By James Tempero. 

BuzzFeed Staff. 

High-quality article.

So, you’ve got an academic essay to write? Not sure where to start? Don’t know the difference between APA and MLA? Wondering how you made it to the third year of university? Well, worry no more. All you need to do is follow these twenty easy steps, and you’ll be an essay expert in no time!

Now, you can trust me, James Tempero BuzzFeed Staff, because I’ve literally written over one million essays over the past three years, so if anyone knows their stuff, it’s me, James from BuzzFeed Staff. Here’s a tip for free: you can never have too many commas! 

Academic essays can be hard to write, especially of the academic kind. So grab a hot cup of joe, pull up a chair, and let’s dive WRITE into the world of academic essays. 

1. Feel an unbelievable amount of dread 

When you sit down to start, you’re going to feel just the worst sense of dread wash over you. This is a good thing! Make sure you hold onto that feeling and get to know it. You’re going to be roommates for a good couple of weeks! 

2. Make a decision you will regret by step ten 

Time to pick an essay question! This step will change the course of your life for the worse, and there is no avoiding it. Make sure to pick the question that will take the fewest years off your life – only one to two years is ideal. If you are writing an English essay and have the choice of writing about different novels, pick the question for the novel with the least amount of words. It may also be good to consider which novel has a SparkNotes summary because lord knows you’re gonna need it. 

3. Overwhelm yourself with smart people’s writing

Now that you’ve picked the wrong topic, it’s time to hop on over to your google scholar or equivalent tab and start downloading journal articles! Download anything and everything that slightly relates to your topic. Don’t even bother reading the abstract, trust me. Once you have a pile of articles in your downloads, you better feel overwhelmed. If you aren’t overwhelmed, return to google scholar and download ten journal articles on climate change, this always helps. 

4. Try and read the first one  

Now that you’ve got a pile of documents, it’s time to get a reading. Open the first article and let it sit on your screen for a good four to six hours. Don’t let your eyes leave the screen during this time, but also make sure you don’t scroll past the first page. You should spend at least one day on this step. This is key. 

5. Reading sux! 

Man, reading journal articles took at least ten years off my life. 

6. Cheat 

I’ll let you in on a secret, you don’t really need to be reading all of these journal articles. You just need to use command/control F. Open a journal article, press this key, and then type in words from the question into the search bar. Now copy-paste the paragraphs involving these words into your document. These quotes can always be twisted when it comes to writing. Trust me. 

7. Look at what you have so far and cry

When you have finished taking important information somewhat relating to your topic, you should have over 10,000 words in your document. Importantly, they should be 10,000 words that you don’t really understand. This is generally one of the best times to cry because you’ve spent a week mucking around not really understanding what you are reading and now that it is all together in one document a crushing feeling of incompetence should be circulating in your body. On the bright side, you have 10,000 words! Yay! 

8. Try and make sense of life as we know it 

Okay, so you might be feeling a little overwhelmed with everything in the world by now. But can we just bottle that up for now and write a quick outline? Create a list of bullet points, from one through to ten. For each point, write a sentence that is tangentially related to your topic. I know you don’t understand the essay topic yet, but we are kind of running out of time, so you need some type of outline for your body. Quick.

9. Clean your room

Cleaning your room is great because at the end you’ll have a clean room and also it is a day where you don’t have to be writing your essay. After you’ve cleaned your room, clean the rest of the house. And then after that, start moving the journal article paragraphs around into the ten points from your outline, in accordance with what words are most similar. Similar letters will do. It’s like doing an awful puzzle.

10. Regret

I told you this step would come! Although you’ve felt a sense of regret throughout the whole process, THIS regret should be on another level. Sure, you have a rough outline and a whole lot of great information from journal articles to back it up. But, none of it should make sense, none of it should flow, and none of it should relate to the question! Why did you pick question two and not question four? What were you thinking? If you’re feeling good about your question by this step, you must restart. I don’t make the rules.

11. Snack break! 

Remember to eat plenty of food! Unprocessed sugar tends to do the trick – straight from the sugarcane. 

12. Look at the screen until your eyes are in physical pain and your brain is screaming “NO, PLEASE STOP, I CAN’T DO ANYMORE” but also keep writing because you have no time left

It’s time to start writing. This is by far the best part! And by the best part, I mean the best part, because writing is a blessing, especially academic essay. Start from paragraph one, and try to put together what you have. Write a topic sentence like those ones they teach you in school. Then paraphrase some of those fancy journal article quotes. Nice! Now just quote more of them because that’s how academic essay. Great Job! Now for your final sentence, summarise what you have said throughout the paragraph while using words from the essay topic that you – if we’re being honest – barely touched on, to give it the aroma of an argument. 

13. Wait, things are starting to come together?

When you get to the fifth or sixth paragraph, you should have a brief moment where you feel good! You’ll be on a streak, words will flow from your brain to your 2015 MacBook Air, and you’ll start to love again. Run to the nearest person, a friend, family member, or random person on the street. Say “it’s starting to come together [name], I just had a streak where I wrote for like ten minutes straight it was incredible.” Enjoy this moment, you earned it. 

14. Hold up. No, no. This makes no sense 

Obviously, you were delusional in the last step because what you’ve written sucks. Some of the worst stuff I’ve ever read. Find the same person you just spoke to and apologise to them for lying. It is okay to cut things from your essay that aren’t making sense. It is better to have a slightly shorter essay with information you understand than a paragraph that sticks out like a sore essay writing thumb. Woah, was that some real advice? Get outta here. 

15. Express genuine rage at your inability to do the simplest of tasks

It’s finally time to write your introduction and conclusion. These are honestly the hardest bit and no one really knows why – not even Ronald Introduction, the inventor of the introduction. This part is frustrating because in real life you’re only up to like step ten but your brain physically can’t write a single word. Yet, out of procrastination, you were able to open up a google doc and write up a 700-word outline for this very piece. It has just flown right out of you. What is wrong with you? Your essay is due! Stop writing this!

16. Grammarly.com 

Editing is a pain because you’ve written 3000 words at this point and it is all sucks. At least grammarly.com makes it sound nice. 

17. Regret part two

Oh God, did I mention you should be referencing as you go? Wait, you haven’t been referencing? Good luck with this part haha. 

18. Hand in your essay 

This part is funny because if you are at Canterbury University and submit something, you’ll get an email saying “you have submitted your assessment.” However, the notification on your phone should cut off towards the end to read “you have submitted your ass.” It makes me laugh every time. If you are at this point and feel happy with what you are submitting, there’s a good chance you messed up one of the steps in this process. I’d restart if I were you. 

19. Have a day off 

You earned it! When you get your results back, you’ll probably have the same mark as someone who did theirs in half an hour. Whereas it took you two weeks! Don’t let this upset you! Enjoy your day off! ENJOY IT. 

20. Get back to work 

Eh. I’m bored of this bit now. That was fun. I submitted my last essay for undergrad a few days ago. Feels good to write something silly and edit some silly photos. I’m just so silly! My favourite is the biblically accurate Grammarly. Did you know Buzzfeed articles capitalise every word in their title? Those people are lawless. I should submit this to whatever their freelance program is.

I’m off to have a nap. Bye bye.