How Not to Write a Term Paper in 15 Easy Steps

Step 1. Begin your research weeks before the rest of the class has even daydreamed up a topic. Read the relevant books and papers, highlight and take notes. Congratulate yourself excessively.

Step 2. Relax.

Step 3. When the rest of the class appears to engage in research-like behavior, organize your research and write a fabulous outline that needs nothing more than to be fleshed out and peppered with notable, relevant quotations. Congratulate yourself excessively.

Step 4. Relax.

Step 5. Feel threatened when, long before the paper is due, your former best friend attends class fresh-faced and fancy free... with the completed project casually dangling from their fingertips. "Oh, it's not done," they say. "I still haven't written the bibliography."

Step 6. Stop relaxing. You have a paper to write, you twit.

Step 7. Three days to due date. Three-quarters of your paper is written. Scores of mostly-mangled articles litter your desk. Decide this topic is boring, yawn, and pick a new thesis - the one you "really wanted to work on all along."

Step 8. Begin to panic. Skim abstracts at the speed of light. Print, staple, scan. Print, staple, scan. Furious highlighting and page-marking follows.

Step 9. Panic. This isn't you. You are not your paper. You are not a grade. Yes... wait. Yes. Yes you are.

Step 10. Transcend panic. Drink more coffee. Coffee is good for you. Take a break and compose blog: How Not to Write a Term Paper. Transcribe this upon a very necessary piece of paper that you will soon destroy with errant coffee-spill. Don't worry - at least it wasn't your laptop.

Step 11. Curse yourself excessively.

Step 12. Wriiiiite damn you!

Step 13. You're done. Hey - you're done! When did that happen? You don't remember - too much caffeine and no sleep.

Step 14. Congratulate yourself excessively. Tell yourself never to do this again.

Step 15. Repeat.