Essays

Do any of you constantly find yourselves writing essays the night before they are due (this applies to people who are in university obviously)?

If you managed to stop doing this, how far into your undergrad did it happen? Have you ever actually read any of the essays you've written in a taurine-fueled delirium months after they've been submitted

Yeah, I do it all the time. I submitted one this Monday that was written in like 6 hours but I still managed to get 74/75 points. I'm just a college freshman, though.

Stopped in the second semester of my undergrad. I forced myself to stay on campus after class (I live 90 minutes away by public transit) until I'd finished whatever I'd assigned myself for that evening. I was better for it and so was my work.
Mainly I gave up on the fiction that I could get any work done at home; that's where I shitpost and play vidya

>tfw regularly had to do 200 word essays (sometimes even higher word counts) in uni but always started working on them weeks earlier and spent time to thoroughly edit

>200 words

What? That's a sentence

doing it right now, actually. I usually don't procrastinate if the essay is about something I'm interested in, though. Writing essays about ethics I'd work on it for a long time to really get my ideas straight but for this essay it's way too boring for me. I have to write about how mill owners in the mid 1800s on the East Coast of the US managed to attract workers to their mills. We've read a book about how it was done so I mainly have to regurgitate this shit that's been jammed down my throat for the past few weeks.

My procrastination just got worse as college went on. The thing about it though was that I was always successful. I think it created a sort of negative-feedback loop where the minimum amount of work I would put into an essay or project would go further and further down. By the time I finished college, it put a big dent in my grades, but the dent was never big enough to jolt me back into responsible habits.

I don't have any real advice to offer. Either you accept the misery of working ahead or you accept the misery of lowered standards. It's misery either way but one builds character and the other breaks it down.

I'm in grad school and still do this. Stress is a god-tier motivator. Last semester I had a 20 page research paper that I wrote in the 3 days before it was due. Also wrote a 2500 word paper in a day, after writing g a 10 pager the day before.

Got a B+, A, and B+ so all in all it works out. Though when I read them after (weeks/months after) I find myself wanting to edit, but that's mainly because I want to write on new stuff or expand my research with new info.

Political science fucking rocks.

This, dammit.

I'm a computer science major, but can't stop slacking off because my first 3 years were so easy. Intro, C++, Java, c#, databases, data structures, algorithms, programming language design. It was all geared to beginners, so I could safely read the news in class and still make straight As. Now I'm a senior, and the classes are a lot harder, but I can't stop lurking Veeky Forums.

I consistently write essays the day before theyre due. I manage to keep getting Bs and As for some reason but i know it's going to catch up to me at some point.
>my final drafts are like two or three sentences more than my rough or second drafts
i cant keep getting away with this.

Just force yourself to think about the questions at least a month before it's due, that way it'll be on your mind. You can also think properly about what you want to say. Then just do it. I always aim to have it done three or four days before the deadline. Don't look at it for a couple of days, come back to it and tidy it up.

god that commute must've been awful

If you're writing essays ahead of time you're doing it wrong. I literally wrote my 8 page essays the day before, and my teacher would always grade them with something like, "I don't believe in perfect papers, but this was close enough."

I lived through it, forced me to get a lot of reading done

thats the fucking worst..... i had to write a 15 page essay just describing what this one medieval book looked like (colour, style of parchment, holes in the paper) and it reduced my life expectancy by 10 years

Looks like a phrase to me

I kept that habit right up to and through the PhD. Was making significant additions to the text of my 100,000-word thesis literally minutes before I had to rush it to the printers for their deadline.

I have never not gotten an A on something I've turned in. The standards of professors just feel incredibly low, and I've been getting worse and worse about things this final semester. For instance. I did a six page paper on South Asian funerary rites yesterday in two hours, and (since the professor emails grades as they're finished and I was lucky enough to be first in line) found I still got a 91 anyway. Why bother trying?

Yes. The problem is you get so good at working right up against a deadline that that's the only way you know how to work. You become highly skilled at blasting out something acceptable in the last minute, but terrible at budgeting your time, so you start to feel like you might as well put it off until that last minute. I recently wrote a 2500 word research paper that was 20% of the course grade in about 12 hours after ignoring it for months. I'm a STEMfag so maybe some Veeky Forumsfags aren't impressed by that, but for me it was an incredibly rushed job.

If you're doing multiple drafts then you're not writing the essays the day before they're due.

Their standards are so low because they have to constantly read lowest common denominator pablum from total shitheads all day so anyone with half a brain gets that treatment. It's either that or the effete super lefty gatekeeper types that will find any excuse at all to dick you over. College isn't worth exerting any effort beyond the bare minimum imo.


I wrote my last English final over the course of maybe an hour and a half the morning of it's due date. I got a 98% and when I got it back the prof wrote on it that I am a "master of the English language". I handed that paper in two other times for two different assignments in the same class, it was worth a 65% at best. I'm half an idiot and write everything at the last minute.

This is me too op. I'm pretty sure one of the keys to changing this habit is to make changes early on in a semester because the farther along you go in the semester the harder it is to fix it.

I am still doing this, and it often works better than spending weeks or months on a text.
I tend to get quite obsessive when spezializing in a subject to the point where I cram in too many ideas in a short space without keeping the reader in mind.
It is easier to just be driven by urgency and the instinct for self-preservation.

I did this all through uni.

I'd spend weeks researching/reading about the topic but I wouldn't write until the night before.

I ended up with a 2:i, because the one time I didn't research enough (dissertation, did FAR FAR less than I should've) I got fucked. I got a 67 because the paper was 'too narrative' in nature (history student). All I needed was a 71 to get a 1st.