Today I finally finished my ethics essay. I have never had so much grief over one essay (of only 2000 words). I expected that writing essays would be hard this semester, as I have had almost no focus and motivation for the last few months (I have hardly read anything this semester). However, I never expected this essay to drag on for so long.
Usually I can write such an essay relatively quickly (in an afternoon and evening at most). This essay took me almost a month from the time that I first started writing to actually finishing. I only succeeded in finishing it an hour before the deadline and was quite dissatisfied with the final result. If I had just sat down and written it from start to finish it would have been relatively straightforward and far more coherent. As it was I added little bits here and there for weeks and ended with such an involved argument that my first draft ran to over 6000 words.
I scrapped the first draft and cannibalized it for a second draft, which ran to another 6000 words. I scrapped that, took another angle of approach, and my final essay came in at 2073 words. Not including footnotes. Once the footnotes were added in, the essay came to 4940 words. I have written better blog posts. The essay was disjointed and grossly overlong, but I submitted it anyway. This afternoon I finally ceased to care about it anymore.
I have now learned that essays with a long gestation period are seldom very good. The more that one thinks about a subject, the more complex and involved one’s argument becomes. The more complex one’s argument becomes, the more difficult it is to fit it into the word limit. Sometimes I wish that our essays just had a minimum word limit. Next time I will probably write the essay off the top of my head and find some references later. That method has worked well in the past.
My essay was on the subject of the authority of the Bible in Christian ethics and I kept having new ideas about possible angles of approach and arguments to include. My recent post on Gutenberg and the Bible was one of three or four side theses that the essay spawned (a number of these were totally removed from the final product). I might post some thoughts on some of the others here sometime.
On another front, there seems to be progress on the housing front (I don’t think that I mentioned that the previous arrangements fell through). Please pray that it will work out.
Alastair's Adversaria 
You wrote more in the footnotes than in the body of the essay…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
That’s how speechless I am…
He’s certainly done it more than once, I think it’s an old trick of his.
I always write essays off the top of my head two days before the deadline. Before that I usually have no idea what I am going to write. I usually only have minutes to spare. Interestingly, I often do more thinking after the submission than before.
I always leave things until the last minute, too. I was writing a report until 3:00 last night, which had to be in this morning. It is sometimes strange. The essays that I have left until the last minute have often given me the best marks. Has anyone else found this?
Generally the essays that I leave to the last moment get the highest marks. Last semester was an exception, though.
One thing that is consistent is the fact that I generally get higher marks for the essays that I enjoy writing the least. My more creative and original essays tend to get lower marks, even though I am convinced that they represent my best work. It seems that if you put original thought into your answer you are bound to be marked down. This semester I only have three essays, two of which will be adventurous and imaginative in their approach. The other will most probably be a boring rehash of traditional arguments.
I seem to get a higher mark the less effort I put into the work. It strikes me as being exceedingly odd, because it means that what I really want to do well at I invariably don’t, although I’ve not failed anything as yet.