What's a reasonable amount of time for me to schedule for a written university assignment, including library research, online journal search, draft and actual writing, to get a better than pass mark? i'm a full time university mature age student, but i'm studying from a distance, so my access to lecturers and other students is minimal. The last two semesters i achieved a perfect gpa, but i've since doubled my study load and i'm finding my current methods aren't working so well for me. I think i'm ready to not aim for that perfect gpa anymore, so you can factor that into what's a reasonable amount of time, if you like. at this point of my current assignment, i m only at 750 words, and i've already invested 14 hours. a six page paper? probably about 20 hours for a top quality job, or six hours for a passing job, all depending upon the subject. I think it's more a matter of understanding your subject than time spent crafting the paper, assuming you have basic composition skills. I'm a fast writer, so i may not be the best person to give advice, but what are you spending all that time on? research? i wouldn't bother sitting down to write until you know what you want to say. The research and thinking about the argument ought to be what takes up most of your time.

This is because once i've done the proper amount of research, i'll often just start thinking things through throughout the day while i'm otherwise occupied, writing down particularly good thoughts in a moleskin i carry. So my advice is to schedule things so that you can start far enough in advance like 2 3 weeks before you have to write, giving yourself a week to write and rewrite that by the time you're actually writing, you've had time to give it a great deal of thought. The writing is easier then too, and i think you actually save time while ending up with a deeper, more polished piece. So it might be 20 25 hours, but for me the important thing is to invest the first 5 hours of discovery and exploration a good deal of time before you write.

I'm embarrassed i only looked under the study tag, homework is what my kids do. This current assignment, i spent say two hours at the library collecting materials, 2 hours reading through those materials and making notes, and 10 hours writing and searching for online journal articles to make points that my library materials didn't. Posted by b33j at 1 pm on april 19, 2007 if it's a subject that i am learning as i am writing it, something i try hard to avoid but can't always do most of my time is spent reading the sources in order to figure out what to write about. If i assume that i am using 3 books and 2 articles, this kind of essay would probably take me around 20 hours at most. If it's a subject i am already familiar with, most of my time is spent writing the paper, since i'll only need the sources to support my ideas. If i assume that i am using 2 books and 3 articles, this kind of paper probably takes me about ten hours.

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As you may have already figured out, i always get someone else to proofread my papers familiarity with the topic you are writing about is the key to reducing the amount of time you have to spend writing a paper. If it takes me longer than that to find resources on a topic, it's time to switch topics. Choosing a topic that has a lot of good sources available for it is another important part of reducing the amount of time it takes to write a paper.

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The first level being magazine articles that walk you through the topic like time or the economist. The second level being books that are targeted towards non professional interest in the subject. In liberal arts subjects, where scholarship often equates to digging up quotable materials, one key benefit of research is often a directly abbreviated writing load. I've frequently gotten an a on papers where 40 to 50% of the total word count came as quotations from sources. In technical subjects, where the goal of a paper is to summarize and present original laboratory research, the writing effort is greater, as you need to spend time organizing and analyzing data, creating figures, doing some layout, and still put in the effort to create a sensible narrative that describes your experimental process, your results, and the conclusions you draw from those results, in terms of your experimental hypothesis. So the subject matter and acceptable writing methodology has to be taken into account in discussing averages for research and writing time. For a 6 to 7 page single author paper, in an undergraduate liberal arts discipline, to apa style template standards, i'd suggest that 10 hours is sufficient time, in toto, with roughly 6 hours given to research and outlining, 3 hours given to draft, and an hour given to editing and final output production printing/pdf creation/e mailing.

For an original undergraduate research paper, in the physical sciences, of 6 to 7 page length, with 3 principal figures, to apa style standards, perhaps twice that, or 20 hours. Posted by paulsc at 1 pm on april 19, 2007 for me, it really depends on the subject. For a geography essay entailing the use of about a dozen journal articles, i suppose i would invest about 5 6 hours researching/reading and then another 5 6 writing editing i would spend more time actually working on the assignment, but that's my rough guess when i take away procrastination hours. For a history paper where i've got to use a fair few books and such, i suppose i'd spend 4 5 more hours researching/reading.

Posted by cholly at 1 pm on april 19, 2007 my assignment writing style has changed over the years so that i am also much like the others that have posted here. I spend most of my time in the beginning doing research and thinking things over. Once you've got the assignment in your head, you can start reading and researching. I guess in this way the research takes me a while, but it's actually all intermingled with my general study anyway, so it's hard to quantify after all, if i'm reading module 3, hopefully module 3 is somewhat related to the assessment!. On the writing itself, i can get that done pretty quickly once i have the knowledge in my head. I recently wrote an assignment that took only one afternoon to finish, with a few tweaks the next morning. It's pretty quick if you know what you want to say! your own way of studying will work best for you.

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I've never once counted the amount of hours i spend on essays, but i'll try to guess for you. Two or so weeks before it's due, i'll wander into the library once or twice and do wide searches for anything that will possibly relate to my topic. I'll find those books, look in the index, have a quick flick through the book to see if it's useful, then add it to my stack without reading it. Over the next two weeks until it's due, i'll browse through the books when i have free time, going straight to the pages referenced in the index. I'll skim read the pages for any reference to what i'm writing on, and if there's something substantial there i'll write it down and write down the name of the book as well!. For ten or so books, this would usually take me an hour or so, perhaps longer if they all have extensive information.

Everything i've read, and what i hope to write, will idly sit in my head while this is happening, and without dedicating any serious time to it, by the time the paper's due i'll have a good idea of what i'm going to write about. The night it's due, i'll waste time and procrastinate, eat dinner, then start at 8ish. I'll sit at the computer, distract myself, sit back down, check email, eat an apple, etc, finally write an introduction, and usually by 2am or so i've finished writing it out. So i guess i put a couple of hours into research, idle nothing time into vaguely planning it in my head, then five or so hours at a computer writing it out.