Working on another midterm paper. I tried a trick where I went into my outline and logged my notes on the source it wants to centre. I find myself padding these things out with explications on my sources, so originally it was just to keep track of where claims were. I found that since the notes were point form and mostly me talking to myself to make sense of the reading, I could just throw them into the body outline and massage them into complete thoughts and arguments, starting with “to explain this, the author says…” And the author did say that. I cited the page they made that claim.

This will probably make a lot of this paper a struggle in revision, but I’m at least ahead of schedule. Sadly this isn’t a habit I want to get into unless the paper is more a “show you paid attention with the readings” joint.