If you haven’t been in this position before, get out of my face.

You have to write something and you’re staring at that big blank space on your screen that’s whiter than the state of Oregon, praying it will reach out and take brilliant and beautiful information from your brain and wear it like a big, cozy and clever robe. But, it just glares back at you with the same dull, empty expression you’d expect from the old turtle at the zoo as it wakes up from a nap.

Trust me, I’ve felt that before. I’m feeling it right now, in fact. However, there are steps you, and I, can take to end the discomfort of staring helplessly at a blank screen until your eyes wither like a sponge in the desert.

For example, you can always, always, always use repetition. Sometimes it helps to just write the same word over and over and over and over again to fill up space and take up time while you think of something kind of kind of kind of kind of productive. You’ll never ever ever ever ever ever have to worry about a page minimum again!

Or, you can make really general statements that take a lot of time to narrow down to your stupid point. Like, in the beginning of your life, you were just a cell. Think about that. Wow. Just one cell. Look in the mirror. Now, you’re much bigger than a cell. In fact, you are a lot of cells. You’ve grown into a trillion cells. That means you are a trillion times better than you were when you were first conceived. That’s impressive. People get awards for “most improved” for doing a lot less than improving themselves by a trillion times what they used to be. You can do anything! You can build a spaceship, make out with Kate Upton or even pull the cork out of a wine bottle without a corkscrew. So if you can do that, you can find a way to make a general statement and take a lot of time to narrow it down to a single point while writing a paper.

A favorite tactic of mine is the attack of the rhetorical questions. What do I mean? Do you really want to know? You want to know what I mean by using a bunch of rhetorical questions? Let me ask you this: is a flower more beautiful in the rain or in the sunshine? Does a bird forget to sing if he does not sing for a long time? Are you afraid of the dark when you have someone beside you? Is the wind less bitter when you wear a coat, or are you just more prepared? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does anyone care that a bunch of grass got squished? Did you answer any of these questions? Of course you didn’t. You probably ripped this paper in half and cursed my family. But you can’t blame me for having not written anything.

Profoundly, the most superlative gambit to writing when you have no bloody idea what you’re saying is to use elephantine, prodigious words over and over again. Don’t worry about being erroneous in your use of such ostentatious language, for your imbecilic reader won’t ever confess to not being in full awareness of such magniloquent language, and will simply dissimulate their familiarity with what you are saying out of a consternation of chagrin. Not only do photosynthesis words achieve the effect of hoodwinking your reader into believing that you are perspicacious and discerning, they also have very many letters, which extends your writing to a pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis degree.

The most important thing you can do when you are writing something, and don’t have the slightest idea of where you’re going with it, is to simply finish the paper by saying something that has absolutely nothing to do with what you were saying before. It will embarrass the reader into thinking they weren’t paying attention and make them think they missed something important. The blame is then moved onto them. I know it sounds weird. Seriously, if you ask her early and get her something nice like a teddy bear or chocolates, it is a lot more likely that the cute girl in your favorite sorority will say, yes, to going to your formal.