The blank page, without outsourcing it

Why the first sentence is hard

Staring at a blank document is not laziness and it is not lack of ideas. It is usually one of four things, and each has a different fix. Diagnosing which one you have takes thirty seconds and saves an evening.

You do not know enough yet. The honest and most common cause. Nothing will make writing possible; go and read three more things and take notes. If you cannot say what the argument is in one sentence out loud, you are not ready to write, and no technique substitutes for that.

You know enough but have not decided what you think. Free-writing fixes this. Two hundred words of deliberate rubbish, then find the definite sentence.

You have decided but the first sentence has to be perfect. The standard is the problem. Write a placeholder (literally THIS ESSAY ARGUES THAT in capitals) and carry on. Come back at the end when you know what the essay actually did.

You are avoiding it because it is unpleasant. Not a writing problem. Twenty-five minutes on a timer with the internet off.

Fixes that do not cost you the essay

• Start in the middle. There is no rule that says the introduction comes first. Write the paragraph you are most sure of, and the surrounding structure often becomes obvious.
• Write the topic sentences only. One sentence per paragraph, stating what that paragraph argues. Six of those is an outline you can defend, and the essay is then a filling-in exercise.
• Explain it to someone. Out loud, to a person or a recording. Transcribe. Edit.
• Write the conclusion first. If you know where you are going, the argument that gets there is easier to construct.
• Change the medium. Paper, a different font, a different room. Trivial and it works often enough to be worth trying before anything else.

The legitimate role for a model at this stage

The safe uses are all interrogative rather than generative.

I have to answer this question. Here is what I think, roughly, in a hundred messy words. Ask me five questions that would force me to be more specific. Do not answer them and do not suggest a thesis.

That is a research supervisor’s move, and it works. Questions push you towards your own position; a suggested thesis replaces it.

Also safe:

• What is this question actually asking? What are the ambiguous words in it? Genuinely useful and often reveals that you were about to answer a different question.
• What would somebody need to establish in order to answer this well? A map of the work, not the work.
• Here are my six topic sentences. Which two are making the same point, and where does the argument jump? Diagnosis on your structure.

The unsafe one, precisely

Give me a thesis for this question and give me an outline are the two requests that remove the essay. They feel like small favours because the output is short. The length is misleading: a thesis is fifteen words and it is the entire piece.

If you have already asked and are now looking at a suggested thesis: do not simply use it, and do not simply discard it either. Write down two other positions somebody could take on the question, then choose between all three and write out the reason. You have converted a supplied answer back into a decision, which is what the stage was for.

When the deadline is tonight

Honest practical advice for the situation everybody is actually in sometimes. The order that saves the most:

1. Twenty minutes deciding what you think. This is not the step to cut; an essay with a clear claim and thin evidence beats a well-evidenced essay with no claim, in every marking scheme.
2. Topic sentences for every paragraph, written by you. Fifteen minutes.
3. Draft fast and badly. Do not edit while drafting.
4. Use the time you have left on the parts that carry marks: the argument’s clarity and the evidence, not the introduction’s elegance.
5. Check the references. All of them. This is the step people skip under pressure and the one with the worst consequences.

Notice that nothing in that list is ask a model to write it. Under time pressure, that route produces a mid-band mark at best and a misconduct case at worst, and it takes about the same amount of time as doing it.