(no subject)

To those of you who have taken writing-intensive college-level courses more recently than I have...

When you're given a writing assignment, and told that the finished product is expected to be about 4 to 5 pages long, what assumptions are the professors and TFs making about the formatting? Single spacing or double spacing? (I have spacing set to 1.5; double-spacing looks crappy IMHO.) Block indents of supporting quotes? I assume the default margins and font size Word comes up with are right on; I think monkeying with those would start to look fishy.

I'm not trying to weasel out of more writing-- I have already filled almost 4 of these 5 pages, with 1.5 spacing and extensive quoting from the source material, and yet I still have points that need to be explained and a transition to be bridged. I'm just trying to figure out the scope of what they're expecting. Would directly asking the TF about line spacing sound too much like grade-grubbing?

uh, snow?

At this moment, tiny snowflakes are floating gently around the house. There is not a speck of accumulation on the driveway, even though I have not even shaken the snow shovel in the driveway's general direction. This is the "snow storm" for which they closed Sophia's school? WTF??? It better start snowing a metric buttload very soon, or I am going to have to slap the Town of Andover for being a bunch of wimps.

Do you have this problem?...

Immediately after I write something, I cannot tell whether it is complete drivel. My view of what I have actually written is obscured by the concepts I have in mind. I can't tell whether what I wrote really hangs together logically, or if the words are just bouncing off what I know I want to say in my own head.

This is why I am trying to write the bulk of this paper 6 days before the first draft is due. (Who does that???) Six days from now, I should be able to read what I wrote objectively enough to see what needs to be fixed.

Oh, and bap fizzle blooody glop boom bip dizzly.

Survey says:

Double-spaced.

Including, according to the MLA, the block quotations. Yow, that's going to make it n pages longer.

Holy crap, I'm actually going to have to edit this down. After having spent days wondering "how am I going to stretch this out to over 4 pages?" Ironic. Well, good, I think that much of the part about Kropotkin working within the Darwinian paradigm needs to get the axe. But I'll wait until I have some temporal distance from what I've written before I figure out where to swing the axe.

...

Still not really impressive snow accumulation yet.