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How to Write a Term Paper in less than 40 Steps:

1. Wait until the night before it's due. Sit in your significant other's chair watching Adult Swim and surfing the internet for “techniques to end procrastination,” telling him you have a paper due the next day, but it's all cool, you've done the reading. All you need to do is get up in the morning and write the thing.

2. Gawk at Craig Ferguson, the Scottish Silver Fox.

3. Go to bed around midnight, rationalizing you'll wake up early to get started on the paper. You might have to revisit the topic at this point (it's a little vague in your memory), but decide you can just as easily do that first thing in the morning too.

4. Before going to sleep, set two alarms, just to be diligent. Set one for 3:00 a.m. because you actually want to wake up at 4:00 a.m. and need the satisfaction of turning the first alarm off and going back to sleep. However, you don't want to wake up your significant other with all that beeping, so you set it discreetly under your pillow, within easy reach.

5. Turn first alarm off.

6. Hit snooze button on second alarm.

7. Hit snooze button again.

8. Start to hit snooze button for the third time, then just decide you'll get up at 6:00 and turn the alarm off. One more hour of sleep will be good for you.

9. Get up after 7:00.

10. Spend 30 minutes in a series of expletive-filled (you) and grunting (it) arguments with the coffee maker, most of which the machine wins by delivering hot, brown water that looks and smells like coffee, but isn't coffee.

11. Give up on coffee and have a Mountain Dew instead. Ignore significant other's remarks about how he doesn't understand how you can drink that shit first thing in the morning.

12. Pet the cat. Petting an animal reduces stress, you know.

13. Locate power cord for ailing laptop. Plug in, turn on, log into school e-mail to locate assignment topic. Discover it's not there, log into school's online course site, click on wrong course by mistake, frantically hit the “back” button and then wait for your computer to unfreeze itself before locating the proper class.

14. Pull up a blank word document, put your name, class, professor, and date in the top left corner. Log into facebook. Check the walls of friends in your class to see if they've started their paper. Write on said walls.

15. Realize you need the book from three weeks ago, and ransack the apartment looking for it. You thought you had left it in a bin on the green loveseat, but you've since cleaned up for company and forgot where you put the bin. Locate book on top of the fridge, think [???].

16. Back in front of your laptop, give your paper a banal title: basically, “The Assignment,” condensed and with proper capitalization.

17. Pet the cat. Did you know pets can also reduce blood pressure?

18. Look at the clock and realize you have four hours to write seven pages. No big deal, you think, once I get rolling I can whip out a page in twenty minutes. Attempt thesis paragraph.

19. Significant Other asks if you're going to make your deadline on time, and feigning nonchalance you dismiss his queries while simultaneously excavating last week's pile of clean laundry, figuring you're going to have to shower sooner or later, might as well do it now. Claim you're using the shower time to “develop your arguments.”

20. Secretly, you're a bit worried. Breakfast might steady your nerves. Protein. Always good.

21. With three hours left you're a page and a half into your essay. Google “[your book title] quotes” in an attempt to glean easy quips to integrate into your paper without rifling through the entire book. After checking three or eight sites, you realize none of them have proper (read: any) page citations, so you'll have to spend another twenty-seven minutes rummaging through the book anyway.

22. Ask significant other what another word for “_________” is (you don't want to sound redundant), spend eleven minutes arguing about meaning of said word before an appropriate substitute can be procured from thesaurus.com.

23. Two and a half hours left: go to the bathroom, grab another 'dew. Not at the same time, of course.

24. You're on a roll now, you've only got four pages to go! Still on track with about twenty thirty minutes per page. Just because you're doing so well, revisit facebook. Your brain was starting to get fried anyway. A study break is healthy once in awhile.

25. Nineteen minutes later, feeling vaguely guilty, return to your paper. You're absolutely determined to have no more distractions. Run out of things to say with two pages left.

26. Pet the cat. She's such a needy little thing, and she's giving you the puss-in-boots eyes. Probably because she's been in your plants.

27. Water plants. Between the cat and neglect, it's a miracle they're still alive, really. Apologize to the plants.

28. Edit paper in an attempt to find something more to say. Realize you have thirty-six minutes to finish your last two pages. Waste five of those minutes freaking out.

29. You need a conclusion! That will draw it out to five and two-thirds of a page, and don't forget to reiterate every main point.

30. Add a works cited page for page seven. Copy and paste in some websites that are marginally related to your topic title, hoping your professor will be impressed you did “outside research” without actually checking the websites.

31. Save paper.

32. Attempt to upload paper. Curse when upload fails.

33. Save paper again, just to be safe. This time close the document.

34. Attempt to upload paper again. Upload successful, and with four minutes to spare. Next time, you vow, you'll start sooner.

35. Gratifyingly shut laptop, stretch out, pet the cat, freeze halfway to the bathroom. Run back to laptop, hurl a few choice words at it when it won't wake up fast enough, misspell your password (twice), upload paper for the third time. This time, upon receiving the “upload successful” message, submit the damn paper.

36. It's 12:01. Have a drink.

Other tips for Writing Under Pressure a Successful Paper

• Learn to mimic your professor's diction and syntax patterns. Writing in their voice makes it seem like your ideas are their ideas, and they'll be more likely to give you a better grade.
• Be sure, also, to agree with any position your prof takes on whatever topic they've assigned for your paper, even if you have vehement opinions to the contrary. Chances are, if you've taken good notes (ha!), all you have to do is parrot your notes back to them in intellectual-sounding language.
• However, don't be a kiss-ass.
• Make use of the block quote, especially block quotes with dialogue. Scientific paper? Graphs, baby! Diagrams, flow charts, pie charts, bar graphs, line graphs, scatter graphs. If it's relevant, use it. It's a great way to take up space.
• And for god's sake, don't try to be witty. You're working on a deadline here.