I didn't think there would be a follow-up post on this topic, but you never know where a blog is going to take you.
I've been shut up in my room without internet since Friday, with the exception of an hour in the computer lab at school on Sunday, and it's enough to drive me crazy. Especially since I have spent most of that time writing a paper on the subject of... blogs. (If I was shut up in my room for two days without internet and without looming deadlines, I'm sure I would be quite happy to watch some of the movies I own and read through half of my bookshelf. But I had a looming deadline.)
This paper is supposed to be 8-10 pages, with type size 11 and 1.5 spacing, which ends up being at least 3,500 words. Okay. Not the end of the world. Luckily I had done some research Wednesday and saved several articles to my computer, so I could do most of the writing without the internet. I'm not quite finished, but close.
Today in class - the first since last Tuesday - everyone asked each other about their progress on this essay, which is due tomorrow at 6 p.m. The answers varied greatly, but the one that surprised me the most was from a classmate who said he wasn't a very good typer and had therefore written his entire paper... by hand.
All I'm going to say is - imagine! That used to be the norm! Despite my love of pen and paper, I can't imagine doing such a thing. I remember a few years ago, I used to sometimes get started on a research paper by writing the introduction by hand, because my ideas seemed to flow better that way. Nowadays, I can get started very easily on the computer. But since I began my bachelor's degree, the idea of writing 3,500 words of academic writing by hand hasbecome more or less... unthinkable.
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3 comments:
All my papers in college were written by hand-I didn't even have a typewriter. And this was the University of California in the mid-50's.
And research was trying to find the books you needed from the library which were often on loan to professors for the semester.
Oh boy I remember grading papers written in a loopy hand, green ballpoint ink, lined paper... even once a pencil-written paper. Dozens of them. That was at Mills College, where the undergrads were not always the swiftest… I'd never do that again. There was even one paper that had Xeroxed scraps Scotch-taped to handwritten papers, for internal quotes. Disgusting.
Grandmere, the part about the professors having the books for the semester sounds classic. That sort of thing still happens when 25 people are writing a paper on the same topic and using the same small, rather provincial library (as we were in Middelburg).
Grandpere, Why did you never tell me that about Mills students when I was applying, or registering, at that school? Those papers do sound... pretty disastrous... scotch-taped xerox scraps?! Now that's quality!
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