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Should read, Failbook
because you should make the margins larger vs smaller, si?
Wouldn’t you be making the margins really BIG?
Same thing I thought!
ditto
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Likewise.
How does this crap get put on the main site? Small margins? Never in my life for an essay…
mabye it was an essay about how (not) to write an essay?
I’ve had essays where I was supposed to have no more than 5 pages, and no matter how much I cut, I still couldn’t get it down to 5, so I narrowed the margins enough where i got it down to 5 1/4, which prevented me from losing points.
Same thought. Unfortunately for me, several of my professors measured my margins with a ruler. *sigh*
That’s why smart professors specify a word limit (easily checked by either asking for electronic submission (instead of or alongside the hardcopy) or using OCR) rather than a number of pages. That’s still a stupidly arbitary requirement, but at least it’s a little more real-world and means you don’t get scuppered by not having a Thesaurus Of Very Short And Very Long Words so you can make it up/down to the required page length despite having covered all the required points in half a page / pared it to the bone but still become a victim of word-wrap.
I typically had to either
a/ make my own margins either about half as thin as the default, reduce font by 1/2 point, make the character spacing a futher half-point thinner, paragraph/line spacing also reduced (particularly handy when they want “doublespace” – as little as 1.75x can do the trick) and turn on agressive hyphenation… or,
b/ go the other way with the font and chara/line spacing, turn off all hyphenation and kerning, and eke the margins out millimetre by millimetre until the copy JUST left 49% whitespace left on the (say) 4th page of a “4 page” essay.
Because the amount asked for often seemed completely arbitrary and rarely matched up to the actual space required for the rest of the essay spec. Maybe it was supposed to be an exercise in making your paper fit the space given for it in a journal or something. Personally I think that’s the journal editor’s job, and in any case, if you look in a real one… submissions are all different lengths anyway. The cycle was typically… get the assignment… work out what points they wanted you to cover… research them… write to said spec… then spend another few hours (or whatever minutes were left before the subs desk shut, allowing a further 15 for the classic print ‘n’ sprint) doing the above tricks and padding out the sentences and paragraphs with various BS – or reducing it to a very terse, creative, computer error message kind of english in order to fit.
The idea is to force you to condense your thoughts and build a succinct argument. If you’re forced to structure your paper to be shorter, it will help you be efficient with words and evidence, which forces you to consider what’s really important. The result, of course, is a much better constructed and clear argument with a much better flow.
the length of a work of prose is truly irrelevant when measuring it’s quality.
Dude, it’s just a general joke about how you put more energy into cutting corners than into just getting the damn thing done. Didn’t really care to hear your life story on your writing habits. Fail.
Maybe they had a page limit… as if? Where’s the segment for playing Flash games and eBay?
I think we can assume that comes under “Facebook”, as a catch-all for *insert favourite kind of online procrastination here*.
What are students doing on eBay anyway? I presume it’s more “selling shirt from back” than “obsessive collecting”.
You forgot World of Warcraft too…
also checking the word count…. after hours of hard work: “Alllll right I’ll just check the word count to see how we’re doing aaaaand… zero”
yyyyep
Or – much much later – moments before intending to print the final thing… 899 (or 1101) from 1000, with the typical +/- 10% allowance.
And desperately looking for somewhere non-obvious to add or chop that final one. Then realising it’s also counting the date, your title, the headers & footers… augh.
When the essay is on a book there should also be a significant portion that reads “SparkNotes”
copying from wikipedia
You left out sleep. Additional note, 15 page paper, from scratch, with oral presentation, 24 hours. I’d never felt so godly in academia.
30 pages of legal briefs, probably about 15 hours.
Last Thursday sucked.
Sleep?
SLEEP?
Get out.
I think I hacked together most of what counted for the text of my final dissertation (not counting lit review) in that timespan also
—- which explains my final grade 
15 pages in twelve hours? Yawn.
It’s easy to spew that much stuff in that amount of time.
It’s making sure that it’s actually got anything to do with the assignment you’ve been set, then editing and proofreading is the tough thing. Which in itself is easy if you already know the subject… not so much if it’s the one you’ve been avoiding largely because you’re not so expert with it and wanted to concentrate on the subjects you could do more easily.
You just can’t write a paper that fast if it’s a research paper. Unless you’re making up citations…
I tend to do that. I’m really good at bsing my way through just about anything. Except math.
Youtube!!!
And here’s where I’m happy that I do not have a Facebook.
me too
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For me the hard part was always the first couple paragraphs — I’d agonize over those for ages, but once they were nailed down the rest was a cakewalk. And I too had professors who measured the margins AND knew how many words should be on a page at such and such a typeface/margin size. I got away with nothing, so I knew better than to wait till the last minute.
Oh god… the truth… it burns.
Though granted we didn’t have FB back when I was doing it (or for the first two years, internet outside of the library / study rooms / cafes, so getting a connection past 10pm was difficult)… but there were enough other things that filled its place.
Snood!!! I would then see those faces flying across the screen while trying to write….
Just happened to me. 15 pages sucks
This is rediculous. I spend WAY longer than that making a title page…
Another slice should be time spent on Failblog and its related sites. (Ironic how I stumble on this graph while I should be studying for my exam).
Yeah. Ive got one due in 5 hours. I was on facebook and graph jam. maybe i should start…
haha…i came to graphjam because I have to make a graph! But then I got distracted
this brings back painful, painful memories…
You know, in Ye Olden Days, we didn’t even have facebook. We had to procrastinate twenty miles in the snow, uphill both ways.
This is seriously the story of my life right now.
You forgot: Using triple spacing and hoping the teacher will think it’s only double spacing; hoping that the title page counts as one of the 15.
should read: skimming your “research notes”
screw facebook