Writing My First “Big Girl” Paper

Coming into college, I had never written what I would call a “big girl” paper. With the path I have chosen, it focuses heavily on academic writing, something that I have never had help with or honestly, had to do. Sure, I have written essays and speeches for English class but they did not hold as much weight as my papers in college do. 

While I enjoyed my high school English classes, I never felt that I learned much about the writing and researching processes. The most I have researched prior to college was most likely my sophomore year of high school when I had to write an essay on a social justice issue utilizing only two online articles. There were no specific guidelines, dates, years, etc. for me to narrow down and focus my research on. 

Research

My first college paper was on sugar slavery and the Caribbean Island plantations in the 19th century. Utilizing archival websites, I had to find multiple primary and secondary sources that fit multiple guidelines, only discussing the Caribbean Plantations, focusing closely on the 19th century, imperialism, and colonialism. The whole process was overall not that difficult, however, never having done a research paper like this I felt really insecure in my research and definitely could have done better with it in the initial search.

Meeting 

With this paper, my professor asked to meet everyone one on one over Zoom to go over the paper, our sources, and the one page outline she had assigned. When she and I met, she had looked at the sources that I had at the time and showed me just how much I really needed to narrow down the filters. I also (having never done history research) had not realized that I only had secondary sources for all of my sources rather than one or two primary sources and other secondary sources. After that meeting, and many notes taken, I had finally found what I actually needed for my research paper, including the questions that I should be answering in my body paragraphs. 

Formatting

Within the history department here there is specific formatting that we are required to follow for in-text citations. After all of highschool and using MLA format, this was definitely a change of pace for me who was used to writing a practically unstructured essay compared to the Chicago style that I am to use now. 

Writing

I am someone that can absolutely yap for hours, but if you sit me down in front of a computer to write up an assignment for class I will freeze! Words come easy when it is casual, but once you put any form of preparation into it, it will take me forever to complete. Not only did procrastination take over, but so did the loom of the 2,000-2,500 word count that we were told we needed to meet for the assignment. I was gagged, I had barely written anything more than maybe 700 words, how would I be able to put 2,000+ words together without including my name and the title of the paper!

Conclusion

In the end, I had to do the assignment no matter if I wanted to or not. With a final word count of  2,182 words and 8 pages, I had finished the paper, submitting it at 6:48 pm on the due date. While that isn’t the latest nor closest to the due time that I have handed an assignment in this semester, it still is cutting it decently close with revisions and other editing that had needed to be done. Now, still stressed from it, all I can do is wait for my grade.

• Academic
• college
• historical papers
• writing