To begin with, I hate writing in a way that I constantly ask myself what makes life worth living every time I am writing a paper. Even though I have spent two whole semesters to get myself used to writing 3-5 page paper, my inner fear would still appear like a demon that drags me to hell. I may, or definitely, have exaggerated, but that is indeed how I feel when writing a paper. In a word, it is suffering.
I have never seriously written a composition in English that includes more than 12 sentences before I went to university. All right, to be honest, I wasn’t serious enough when dealing with TOEFL or SAT or the placement test. I almost freaked out when it was asked to write a 3-page paper at the beginning of the first semester of freshman year. There were two thoughts that immediately came up in my mind: 1) *BEEP* it, I can’t write a 3-page paper; 2) Okay, I’m gonna fail this writing course. Nevertheless, I somehow managed to pass the course with a passing grade. Am I blessed or something?
As a non-native English speaker, it is hard for me to put ideas into words. To be specific, I can stare at my laptop for an hour with nothing typed in but a flood of ideas in my mind. I used to try several times to go with the flow. Unfortunately, they all ended up similarly that I would eventually get stuck in wording and phrasing at some point.
For now, I have developed my very own technique to prompt myself when writing a paper, which is to GO WITH THE WORD COUNT. I can tell without my brain that how many words that are Times New Roman, 12-point font, and double-spaced would fill how many pages with 1-inch margins. I admit that it is a terrible technique that it is very uninspiring and damages the spirit of writing to some extent. Nonetheless, I would rather keep using this technique until I excavate some pleasure in writing.
By the way, I really start to enjoy using FocusWriter to write for anything with the screenshot of my favorite character in FFXV set as window background. I can’t believe that I even start to like the set of daily goals, even though, by its very nature, daily goals are still just quantified word count.
It Is (Not) All About Me 
I couldn’t help but laugh throughout this as this is the same thought process that goes through my head when writing a paper. I like the creativity and humor involved in your blog posts, which really kept me engaged and interested as to what your entire post would be about.
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I have just managed to finish writing one 3.5-page paper and one 5.5-page paper this week. It was such a nightmare (to me) that I decided to write a post about it immediately after I had finished lol Anyway, thanks for your comment!!!
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I like your post because i can see the originality in it and who you are as a person. your sense of humor is great and I too hate writing papers. A friend of mine taught me how to write efficiently and quick so its not that bad. For each paragraph I have a topic sentence, lead-in, quote and analysis. I simply fill in it and the paragraphs are done before i know it.
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haha I don’t think anyone likes writing papers, I know I don’t. one thing thats helped me greatly with the flow of writing is knowing transitional words. they’re such great sentence enhancers and fluff. 3 pages I’m ok with, I start to freak when they ask for 5 or 6 ugh
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Transitional words are indeed helpful *cough especially when you want to increase the word count cough* My “filthy” technique is to add adverbs wherever I could, such as relatively, quite, completely, and etc.
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I totally understand where you’re coming from about not being a “native” speaker of the language, and yet, are tasked to write at least 3-4 pages on a topic that you may or may not understand too well because of language barriers. It must be incredibly daunting for you to do so. What I’ve heard other people do is type what they want to say into Google Translate and have an English speaker look over for grammatical errors .
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Nah, I would rather like to have some dignity ∠( ᐛ 」∠)_ Besides, I believe the problem with Google Translate is more than just grammatical errors.
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As someone who constantly finds themselves distracted while writing, I really appreciate your suggestion of FocusWriter. I’ve been using writtenkitten.co, which is essentially the same concept. Although with this one, for every 100 words or so that you type, you get a picture of a cute lil animal. I find that this is a really successful way of motivating me to write.
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Ahhhh It’s so cute!!! I guess I could use writtenkitten for wrting something short.
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