ABSTRACT
The commonest, and at times the most disabling, problem to afflict the student essay-writer has nothing to do with the niceties of prose style or the use of the apostrophe. It is the problem of actually getting the words down on paper. You may find it comforting to reflect that this is not simply a student problem but one that faces all writers everywhere, including great ones. In your case, however, the problem is made both simpler and more urgent by the fact that student essays have to be written to deadlines. This means that you cannot afford to write like James Joyce, squeezing out Finnegans Wake a page at a time; still less can you afford to write like Coleridge, who had the grandest ambitions but seldom managed to get down to it at all. Instead you must model yourself on Dickens or the young Kipling (or, indeed, despite the impression given by Stoppard’s comic screenplay, Shakespeare) and adopt, as they had to, the professional attitude that meeting deadlines efficiently is an essential part of the job.
