Paragraph Mitosis: A Secret Technique for Writing Essays

By Grant Whittaker on March 24, 2017

It’s eleven at night and you have a paper due tomorrow. Maybe you’re in the library fighting off sleep in the same chair you’ve been sitting in for hours, maybe you’re in your dorm room with the soft blue glow of a laptop screen lighting your face and stinging your eyes, but wherever you are it isn’t comfortable. You type out a couple of sentences at a time, go back over your notes, throw out what you’ve just written because it doesn’t sound quite right. Now you’re back to square one with nothing to show for it as time creeps closer and closer to midnight.

Regardless of your major, you’re going to have some pretty heavy writing assignments in your future. While there are some stylistic distinctions between writing a chemistry paper and analyzing The Great Gatsby, the two most important parts of academic writing are basically the same across all divisions: the due date and the page requirement.

It's a hard knock life.

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While college kids everywhere usually manage to hit this mark, someway, somehow, it’s usually a draining process and the end result can be less than stellar. As I reach the end of four years spent writing hundreds of pages for an English degree, I’ve written my fair share of stinkers. But, along the way, I’ve managed to acquire some useful strategies for dealing with both of the aforementioned issues while still writing something that at least sounds cohesive and intelligent.

Due dates themselves aren’t really much of a problem. On paper, most essays you’ll have to write give you a pretty generous window to get them done in, in theory. In practice, classes tend to synch to the same rhythms, so you’re liable to get multiple essay assignments at around the same time. Add in your need for a social life, work, and a dozen other obligations and suddenly two weeks start seeming a whole less reasonable. The trick to this can’t really be taught by anything except for hard experience: managing your time is the most important thing. If you can put aside an hour a day to take out a chunk of work, you’ll find yourself keeping pace with your assignments much more easily.

However, you could give over a whole day to writing and still not get anything done. Essays are big undertakings and, while you might be able to weasel your way through five pages without knowing what you’re talking about, writing purely in stream of consciousness is not going to cut it for anything in the double digits. So, as a reward for getting through this whole article so far, I’m going to share with you my little secret for completing papers quickly and snatching that “A.”

I call it “Paragraph Mitosis.”

Start by writing the basic structure of what you want to say; it can be as simple as a few bullet points. After you have that, fill it out line by line. Answer each question you’ve laid out in a couple of sentences and pretty soon you’re going to have a solid core for your paper. Now, it’s time to extrapolate. Read back over what you’ve written and add on as you do so. Maybe you realize that you’ve left something out or you just think of something to say that you hadn’t before.

As you start to inflate your paragraphs, they’re going to start getting really bloated. Start dividing them into smaller, more digestible paragraphs. Not only will you fill up those pages much more quickly than you will writing more linearly, you will also find that your writing begins to take on a consistent voice. As all of your paragraphs come from the same thought process, there will be a seed of that initial thought in each block of text.

Trust me: when it comes to grading papers, nothing will get a professor on your side faster than a paper that is easy to read.

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