One of my most rewarding courses in college was a philosophy course. Most of the grade came from several “short papers”: they had no required length and if we could answer the question in ten words, we were permitted to do so. This forced students to sit down and parse out what did and did not matter; the professor would take off for extraneous garbage, since length was not a requirement.

I ended up producing some of my best undergraduate work during that time.

For other short papers, I actually treated drafts as drafts and went back to totally rewrite (i.e. starting with a brand new document) a paper a few times. This helps you hold on to the stuff that really matters through each iteration, but helps you sort through the unnecessary stuff.

Good point. Another example: I wrote 17 pages of a major research paper today. What that hides is the three weeks of both building my paper research database and generally just punching around, and discussing, and grappling with, and trying to make sense of what I wanted to say. Today was just typing.

I once managed to write a mid-term paper for an English class in less than 2 hours, counting from the time I started reading the topic material (I was fortunate in that the subject was a pair of short stories) to the time I completed the 1,000 word essay. And yes, I did get an A+.

I concur. I do this all of the time. The great thing is when you sit down to write your paper, it’s almost done(at least in your head).