Papers for Two

Lynae N.

November 16, 2009 - 5:06 PM

Once again I am shocked to find myself surprised at the low levels of stress I am experiencing this far into the term. The reality of only having three more weeks of class no longer holds any shock value and I have found myself left with only one assignment left to complete for the term.

I haven't been able to touch this assignment in over a week, however, and while my stress is low I know the magnitude of this paper and am eager to dig in to in. But there are certain sacrifices I've learned to make and I have been stretched to become more flexible in my somewhat, ok very, particular ways of studying knowing that I am sharing the term and homework time with my husband. Brian is in his second year of college now and has transitioned out of a 13 year career as a mechanic. He is gifted and intelligent but he has not had any recent training on how to construct and write papers. This has added the extra task of teaching Brian these skills to my full plate.

We've enjoyed this past week together as we've buried ourselves in a mountain of journal articles as I showed Brian how I create outlines to pull information together across the various papers in a way that isn't overwhelming. We read, highlighted, talked, crossed things out, added others in, and debated the placement and use of certain pieces of information. Through this process, Brian learned how to take a stack of articles and pull out the pieces of information that were relevant for his topic and not become distracted by the rest.

And then it was time to type. Brian typed all day long yesterday and I sat faithfully by his side, coaching and encouraging him as this was a major undertaking for him. We worked on academic wording, flow, creating density and not length, and removing all of the "that's" from the paper we could. Brian quickly picked up on how to cite a paper and how to take the bits and pieces and wrote an impressive paper.

I started thinking about all of the work Brian had done and how much of it was new information for him. Writing academic papers has become so second nature to me that I have failed to see the complexity of this work intensive process. I know that I knew what I was doing when I helped him, but I couldn't recall where or how I'd learned the skills, tricks, and rules that make up writing for school. This was a strange revelation. I realize that my understanding has come from the 18 consecutive years of school building off of each other. I never had anyone sit down with me from start to finish and coach me in writing a solid paper and I'm not sure the help would have been welcome but I see the benefit in it. I'm sure my writing would be far more advanced if I could have started out early in college with a structured framework for writing a paper.

But I am encouraged to see how easily I was able to share this information with Brian. As the situation sits, there is only the abstract and conclusion left for Brian to tackle which opens the computer and the time up for me to start in on my final paper for the term. I have to say this is relieving and while helping Brian was by no means a burden or stressful, I am still glad to see his paper coming to a close so I am turn my attention back to my own work.