I need to figure out the right way to handle academic writing. I’m sitting there, surrounded by books (not to mention my iPad, which is stuffed with journal articles and scanned-in book extracts), and every time I need to make a quote or cite a particular point, I have to grind to a halt and search through as many as half a dozen texts to figure out which one is the one I’m looking for.
It’s not such a problem if I’m, say, trying to decide which translation of the Iliad to quote, or just looking for the right passage from Statius or “Achilles in Petticoats”. On the other hand, it is massively frustrating to go through the five or six different books and articles I’ve read on the history of homosexuality this semester, trying to remember which one had exactly the point I’m trying to make about the raids on “molly houses” in the eighteenth century. Or trying to look through more than a half a dozen sources to try and remember which one described Achilles’ histrionic grief over Patroclos’ death as being like “a good classical widow”.
But what I really want to know is this: how did it get to be Friday already?!
I have less than a week to finish this paper and get it all polished up! And after two and a half days of solid writing, I’m only barely at the start of Section II. (And on top of everything else, I feel like I’ve left out at least half of what needs to be in there.) If I really have to write Section III and Section IV as well….ugh. No way I’ll be able to polish. In fact, I think I’d be lucky to finish at all.
I definitely bit off more than I can chew with this paper.
But I e-mailed the professor and asked him if it’s okay to only do one or two of the sections, so hopefully I can still pull this off.
Hopefully.
