College students, and even high school students, all know the struggle of having to write a paper (or article) at the last minute. Unless of course you aren't human, in which case kindly see yourself out. When you first turn the assignment in, you proudly think you've pulled it off and that the teacher won't even notice! Unfortunately, that's probably not the case. Here are some easy ways to recognize writing that was done at the last minute.
1. Repeating yourself to add length
In at least a few paragraphs, you've run out of stuff to say before hitting the golden minimum of five sentences, so you had to stretch out some ideas into multiple sentences even if they don't really merit that kind of length. You know that you're just essentially saying the same thing over and over again, but you've given up, so it's time to get creative with sentence structure to make it look like you're saying something new when you're really just repeating yourself. Sometimes, you say to yourself, it's necessary to use several sentences to convey a single idea in multiple ways in order to really make sure the point lands (and to ensure that your paragraph is long enough).
2. Spelling and Grammar mitsakes are everywhere
You tried to proofread everything you could, but when frantically glancing over writing at the last minute, it's easy to miss the small mistakes. After all, spell Czech isn't always as affective as you'd like it to be. Hopefully some of you're mistakes will go unnoticed (or if you have an editor, that they will correct them). After all, what really matters is that you cell your point too the reader.
3. You use and abuse the thesaurus
You've drafted out all that you can, but the writing feels kind of pedestrian. Some of the substitutions you select make sense to you, but every once in a while you will use a confabulation whose meaning you don't exhaustively understand, just to increment diversity. No way to know if it actually makes sense until you acquire feedback, I surmise.
4. There's a paragraph or two that you don't really know how to finish
You've written all that you can about whatever topic you're discussing, but you're not quite sure how to resolve the paragraph in order to make a coherent argument. You've already reached for every corner-cutting tactic possible, but you're still stuck. Sometimes, you may even just stop writing mid-sentence because you don't know how to finish it. I guess the only thing left to do is go on to the next paragraph and come back to finish this one after you've
5. Paragraph-writing conventions go right out the window
You have some ideas of what you want to say, but the whole thesis/body/conclusion format of the essay, and of each paragraph, is weighing you down. After a certain point, you just start rambling in no particular direction, distinguishing paragraphs arbitrarily so that it looks legitimate. Hopefully the reader(s) will get the gist of what you're trying to do with this piece.
These sorts of mistakes are easily avoided, but hey, everyone makes them at one time or another. The best you can tell yourself after handing in an atrocity like this is that next time, you won't make the same mistakes. Whether that ends up being true depends entirely on you. Also, if you need tips to stop procrastinating, look here to find some great tips about staying on task!
