Introduction

I have never been the biggest fan of writing, all throughout high school, I have struggled with organizing my thoughts and figuring out how to write a clear and cohesive paper. In the fall of this year, I took an anthropology class and I had to write papers very frequently. That class was easily one of my favorites and I did not even mind writing, because I was writing about things that I am genuinely interested in. The first day of class, my professor set a timer and told us to write. It could be about anything, as long as we kept writing for ten minutes. She said that that is how we should write papers. So many times I feel like we tend to overthink what we write before we even write it. But using that technique of just writing, letting the flow of your thoughts become the ink on the page and then touching it up afterward, even now, it eliminates the temptation of overthinking and doubting the words you were going to write. I tend to focus well in places that are fairly quiet, not too loud but also not so silent that the sound of my breathing is audible and distracting. I usually put headphones in on the lowest volume setting and just dive in. I start by beginning paragraphs, putting thoughts of what I want to say so then I can elaborate on them and connect them to other points later. After I have a couple full paragraphs, I decide how and where I’m going to transition some points to try to make the paper as a whole as comprehensible as possible.