We all know it’s better to plan ahead and work on an essay well ahead of the deadline, but let’s be real — it doesn’t always work out that way. If you have a deadline approaching and little or no progress on your essay, there’s no reason to be frustrated with yourself. After all, you can’t change the past. Instead, the best thing is to focus on how you can produce the best possible work in the time you have left. It’s always better to turn something in than nothing at all, so here’s how you can write a last-minute essay.
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Make An Hourly Schedule
Measure the amount of time you have until your deadline and divide it into the hours you are able to work. Then, give yourself a set number of hours to work on each stage of the process. If you are a planner, you might divide it into a reading stage, an outline stage and a writing stage, whereas if you’re a seat of your pants writer, you might divide it into a reading stage, a writing stage, and an editing stage.
Commit To A Topic
One of the trickiest parts of writing an essay is choosing what you’re going to write it about. If you’re strapped for time, however, you won’t want to spend too long deciding. Even if it isn’t your favourite or ideal topic, choose something that you know you are familiar enough with that you can engage with the prompt.
Speed Read Your Sources
Another strategy for your last-minute essay is to not get caught up in the details. If you try to read every source front to back, you won’t be left with much time to write. Instead, look for headings and topic sentences that reflect what you’re talking about, and skim over things that aren’t relevant to your argument.
Cite As You Go
Many people will write their essay first and then add in their bibliography at the end. However, you don’t want to end up with no citations because you ran out of time to do this. Instead, add each citation to your bibliography as you reference it.
Divide Your Word Count
Word counts can be very intimidating when you’re trying to write a last-minute essay. However, they can be much less stressful if you divide them into manageable pieces. If you’re using three related topics for your 3000 word essay, for example, you can write roughly 1000 on each. And each of those 1000 words might be three paragraphs.
See also: How To Cram The Night Before An Exam