Still stuck on this HUGE paper

[Paintinmyhair]

I was meant to get my abstract in yesterday. I am struggling so hard to get it to sound anywhere near sensible. I know what I am going to be doing, I know what I need to do (I think) to get there, but I can't work out how to get it down on the screen (wail wail flail flail!). It just sounds rubbish!

Please help!!!

This is undergrad, in fact only worth 7.5 points out of the 35 for the year, but is 40 pages!!! If I don't complete it I fail the whole degree, so it is freezing me! Fancy a word-off Proles? I do 1,000 for every 100 of yours, otherwise it isn't fair!

What have you to write about? I finished my degree two years ago and can still feel the pain of the essay writing now.

European Labour law, but on one tiny weeny 1 page long point, so I'm lobbing in loads of comparative law stuff to bulk it out, and trying to make it relevant. It is just so DULL!!!!

Oh God, poor you!! I don't get on with legal stuff at all and I had to do two modules of it for my degree. One was so arduous the exam was open book as obviously you can't memorise every Act and the date it was created. I scraped through but it was tough.

Good luck with that!

Ok, the house is empty, I am hungover for the first time in two years so am not caring about the outcome of the paper, it is ON!!!!! I might even try and write chapter one! (Although am disgusted that it takes a hangover to make me sit down and write the thing. I should have more gumption than this!)

Just write something, anything, to get started. Once you get into the flow you can go back and mess around with it, the main thing is to just get something on the page to get it going.

My failsafe structure when teaching students how to write essays is the following 5 point plan, which works for something as small as an abstract or as large as a PhD thesis:

Background: who, what, when, where - all the basic info a reader would need right off to interpret what follows.

Problem: What hole in the current literature are you going to fill with this piece of work? Why are current approaches or knowledge insuffivient?

Argument: "In this paper I will argue that" -- tell us what your argument is

Evidence: On what basis are you making your argument? What evidence are you using to back it up?

Wider gesture: Some kind of gesture to the wider importance of your findings to the wider field or discipline.

The introduction to your essay should do 1 and 2 and sketch in a paragraph 3 and 4. In the body of the essay you should use 4 to back up 3. 5 is your conclusion, after summarising your findings.

although I see you last wrote on Thursday so all this might be redundant by now! Hope it went well.