So, you wake up one day to see your English teacher’s new assignment on the board. You’ve never been a good writer and you need a quick way to write a 1000-word essay in less than an hour. Relax! You can still make a great paper if you follow these steps.
1) “Okay…what do I have to write about?”
First, take a deep breath and don’t panic. Everyone starts out as a bad writer at some point or another, but that doesn’t mean you can’t become better as time goes on. As for this paper, the first thing you need is an idea for it- something general that will help establish what your paper will be about as well as create a thesis statement.
For example, “I believe that capitalism is beneficial to the economy” or “The benefits of capitalism outweigh its drawbacks.”
2) “What are the keywords?”
To write your paper quickly, you need to know what will be important. You can’t spend time thinking about what words to put into your paper if you want to finish it in an hour. To avoid this problem (and other problems), use a hand-dandy little tool known as Google. Use search terms like “benefits of Capitalism” and take not of the top 3 pages that come up. Read through them very quickly and choose 5 or 6 key points you see mentioned consistently among these webpages. This establishes the information covered in your essay without spending a lot of time reading.
3) “What do I need to include?”
Now that you have a set of keywords, it’s time for the next step: foundation sentences. Foundation sentences are simple statements that link together your arguments and provide more context into why your topic is important. These should be considered as building blocks- everyone you put down establishes more importance on what follows it up until eventually (hopefully), your whole paper seems like it matters! To use our example from before:
“Capitalism holds many benefits to the economy, such as increased output and an increase in buying power.”
“Of course, there will always be detractors who believe capitalism does more harm than good and some even believe its detriments significantly outweigh its benefits.”
“While it is true there are severe downsides to free markets, they simply don’t live up to the hype by merit of capitalism’s positives outweighing them.”
4) “How do I get through this quickly?”
This part should be relatively simple if you’ve done your research. Use your keywords and foundation sentences in each paragraph to move along at a pace that will allow you to complete your paper in an hour without sacrificing quality. For example:
Capitalism holds many benefits to the economy, such as increased output and an increase in buying power. While some might believe that these gains come at too great a price, detractors fail to recognize all of the ways in which free markets better society overall with less detriments than detriments.
Of course, there will always be detractors who believe capitalism does more harm than good and some even believe its detriments significantly outweigh its benefits…
While it is true that free markets do generate a number of problems (e.g., unemployment and income inequality), the gains to society as a whole make these drawbacks negligible by the merit of capitalism’s positives outweighing them.
5) “What should I watch out for?”
Since we humans aren’t perfect, we all make mistakes from time to time – including when writing essays! As you write your essay in an hour, look out for common grammar errors like referencing yourself using “I” too often or mixing up words like ‘then’ which are similar in appearance but have very different meanings. Also, watch out for typos and poor sentence structure.
If you follow these steps and write your paper systematically, you should be able to get through a 1000 word essay in less than the hour it takes the average person to do so- even faster if you’re experienced!