How to Write a Paper Fast and Still Deliver Excellent Quality

We’ve all been there: a paper is due, and you haven’t even started writing it. All you want is an easy way to write a paper fast so you can have freedom and turn in a decent paper. While writing a paper quickly comes with challenges, producing a paper that meets your standards and your instructor’s expectations is possible. In this post, we’ll explore how to write a paper fast while ensuring it maintains high quality, accuracy, and clarity.

AI writing tools like Conch AI can help you lay the groundwork for your paper while you work to calm your nerves. They can help you organize your ideas, create an outline, and even generate paragraphs to get you started. Then, you can revise and edit these sections to ensure they fit your voice and your assignment’s requirements.

How to Write a Paper Fast While Keeping Quality High

When it comes to writing a paper quickly, planning is crucial. Without a straightforward approach, you can easily waste time jumping between tasks and going down research rabbit holes. Instead, starting with a structured method for organizing your thoughts will help you remain focused and write efficiently.

Strategic Pre-Writing and Phased Approach

To get started, try creating an outline or mind map. These tools help you visualize your argument and organize your research before writing. From there, tackle the writing process in stages. Before you know it, you’ll have a complete paper ready for submission. With practice, writing faster and maintaining quality becomes easier.

Understand the Assignment

The ultimate waste of time when writing a paper is to write something that doesn’t even answer the question the professor is asking. Don’t be afraid to ask the professor to explain any unclear part of the assignment. If the assignment seems vague, it’s not because the professor is trying to trip you up.

Expert Blind Spots

Often, they know their field so well that it’s easy for them to think some things are apparent…even when they aren’t to us non-experts. As an English TA in college, I always saw this problem. Students would spend hours researching and writing a paper on an entirely different topic than the one assigned.

Clarity and Engagement

It doesn’t matter how good a paper is; if it doesn’t answer the question, it will receive a lousy grade. In the best-case scenario, the professor is nice and lets you rewrite it, but why do all that extra work? Asking the professor for clarification shows initiative—that you care about the assignment. Demonstrating this level of engagement with your assignments can only boost your grade.

Research with Ruthless Efficiency

Once you understand the assignment, you need to start researching. But beware! If you’re not careful, research can be one of the best ways to procrastinate. One more source can quickly become hours you could have been writing. To overcome the temptation to procrastinate on research, I employ my favorite approach for beating all forms of procrastination: setting a time limit.

Efficient Research Limits

As I explained in my guide to research, you shouldn’t spend more than 30 minutes per page of the final paper researching. If the paper is supposed to be five pages, don’t spend more than 2.5 hours on research (maximum). Spending more time than this puts you at a point of diminishing returns.

Research for Writing

Don’t worry about not having enough information. If you need more info after you start writing, you can always do more research. Your initial research session will give you just enough material to start writing. Get into the library or database, find your sources, take notes, and write.

Create a Flat Outline

It’s impossible to figure out every detail of your argument before you sit down, look at your sources, and try to write. Most students abandon their hierarchical outline soon after their fingers hit the keyboard. I felt the system was broken since I learned the traditional paper outline method in 8th grade.

From Retrospective to Proactive Outlining

Before writing the paper, I never created an outline with bullets, numbers, and letters. I always made one up afterwards because I had to turn one in with the final paper. Starting in college, I developed a much more effective outlining technique. As it turns out, my technique wasn’t so original after all. In his book, How to Become a Straight-A Student, Cal Newport explains a method of outlining that is very similar to my approach.

The Flat Outline Method

In Cal’s words, it’s called a flat outline. The flat outline works as follows: Don’t build a hierarchical outline. Instead, list the topics you want to tackle in the order you wish to. Revisit the library to find sources for the issues that still need support. Dump all relevant quotes from your sources under the topics.

Writing with a Flat Outline

Transform your topic-level outline into your paper. Don’t start from a blank screen. Isn’t this so much better? The flat outline works because it mirrors the writing process. No one sits down to write with a perfect idea of what they will say. You discover what you’re going to say through the process of writing.

The flat outline gives you enough structure to overcome the dreaded blank canvas while leaving room for discovery.

Create the Perfect Writing Environment

Okay, so you have a rock-solid understanding of the topic, you’ve done your research, and your flat outline is ready. Now, you need to sit down and write the sucker. But not so fast: where you write makes a difference. After procrastination, distraction is the greatest obstacle to writing a paper quickly.

If you don’t have an environment where you can focus, you’ll waste hours jumping back and forth between the paper and whatever distractions come your way. To make sure you have the focus of a zen master, you must create a writing environment that enables zen-like focus. Check out our article for a complete guide to building a distraction-free study space.

In the meantime, here’s a summary of the best practices:

Go to a Studious Place

This could be a quiet part of the library, an off-campus coffee shop, or even your dorm room. Wherever you know that people won’t distract or interrupt you, that’s the place you must go.

Make it Comfortable

You won’t be able to focus on writing if your chair feels like a bed of nails or the table wobbles. Take care of your base physical comfort before writing anything else.

Caveat

Don’t write while in bed. Your bed is only for sleeping and…you know, that other s-word.

Block Digital Distractions

Depending on how bad your internet/phone addiction is, this could be as simple as closing unrelated programs and putting your phone in airplane mode or as drastic as installing an app such as Cold Turkey Writer that blocks everything on your computer until you write a certain number of words.

Eliminate Distractions

If you need the internet to write (maybe you’re writing in Google Docs, for example), you can install an app such as Freedom or SelfControl to block distracting sites. Assemble your supplies. Sitting down to write and realizing you left one of your sources in your dorm is a definite productivity killer.

Prepare Your Environment

Before you write a word, be sure your computer is charged, sources assembled, and coffee/tea ready. Put on your pump-up playlist. If you don’t find it distracting, I recommend using music to get you in the zone to write. I have a few albums on rotation that get me into a writing flow.

For example, I put on Muse’s The 2nd Law when writing this article. You better believe I felt ready to conquer the world with that in the background. If you’re looking for a killer pre-made collection of study music, look at Thomas’s Ultimate Study Music Playlist.

Follow a Standard Structure

Each paper you write should not feel like reinventing the wheel. Your goal when writing a paper for a college class is to fulfill the assignment requirements in a way that goes just above and beyond enough to impress the professor. You’re not trying to break new ground in your discipline or redefine how we use the English language (if you are, then you don’t need to read this article).

Standardized Structures

The way to ensure you don’t get caught up in the structure is just to pick a standard structure for your discipline and follow it. Save the originality for your arguments. So how do you find these elusive standards? Ask your professor. They can point you to some relevant guides or examples.

Learning Through Readings

Pay attention to the readings your professor assigns for the class. This should give you some idea of the academic conventions you should follow in your papers. It’s easy to go through an article and focus so much on the information that I ignore the structure (which is a good thing, the structure shouldn’t distract you).

Template Resources

But if you spend a couple of reading sessions paying attention to structure, you’ll understand how it should go. If that seems too advanced or requires too much work, then another option is to Google the “SUBJECT NAME paper template.” Just be careful about the source— a template from a university is fine; one on some random student’s Blogger page, not so much.

Use Writing Tools and Technologies

Many digital programs and tools are available to make the writing process more efficient. You might find the following tools useful:

Grammarly: Run your paper through this program to catch typos and grammatical errors. It also comes with a built-in plagiarism checker.
Hemingway: This writing tool guides you in writing clear and concise sentences.
BibMe: This citation and bibliography maker will help you create citations based on the sources you provide. It can also organize and store all your citations.
ChatGPT: It’s best first to check if your teacher permits its use first. And, of course, you should never use it to write your paper! But you can use ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas and provide feedback on your paper.

Focus On Quality Over Quantity

If the paper is supposed to have a final page count of 5-7, you may be tempted to write a 7- or even 8-page paper. After all, more is better, right? Wrong. Every college professor told me they would always prefer a good 5-page paper over an okay 7-page paper. Frankly, some topics don’t need 7 pages—5 is plenty.

Concise Argumentation

If you try to stretch it out, you may dilute your argument. If you’re not convinced, consider this: I rarely wrote more than the minimum page count, and I consistently received A’s on papers in English, History, Religious Studies, and Education classes. Knowing this, why would you ever write more than you need to?

It’s not just a waste of time or effort; it may even be counterproductive. Of course, your paper has to be good for this to work. For advice on improving the quality of your documents, check out my post on 6 Writing Tips to Make Your Papers 300% Better.

Draft and Edit Separately

Editing and drafting simultaneously is inefficient and ultimately impossible, like all forms of multitasking. Don’t do it. Write with your full attention and effort, and then edit. Similarly, never stop to look stuff up when you are writing. If you don’t know something, just make a note of it and come back to it later.

Avoiding Internet Distractions

At best, looking something up distracts you from writing, but even more likely, it will pull you into an internet rabbit hole that will derail the entire writing process. Writing this way aims to keep you in the flow state as long as possible. If you can just get to a place of flow, your momentum will be unstoppable.

Write the Conclusion and Introduction Last

One of the most significant barriers to starting a paper is coming up with an introduction. If you think about it, this difficulty makes sense: how are you supposed to introduce something you haven’t even created? This is why you shouldn’t write the introduction until you’ve finished the main body of the paper.

I know it seems counterintuitive, but I challenge you to try it. This method avoids what has happened to me more times than I can count: writing the paper and then realizing that my intro doesn’t even fit the final paper. The same goes for the conclusion.

Write it last. After all, how can you conclude when you haven’t even finished writing? If you want more advice on writing solid findings, check out my post on how to write a paper.

Don’t Edit Alone

When you’re writing the draft, you need privacy and focus. But when you’re editing, having someone else to look over your work can speed things up. Why? Because you’re inherently blind to the mistakes in your writing. You’ve been looking at the draft so long that errors won’t jump out at you the way they will to a fresh set of eyes.

Peer and Writing Center Edits

When finding someone to help you edit, you have a few options: Get a trusted friend to read the paper. Just make sure they don’t end up distracting you. Take the paper to your college’s writing center. Don’t expect them to be your copy editor, though. The writing center staff will likely have you read the paper aloud.

Professor Feedback

This lets you catch the errors yourself while still having the accountability of another person in the room. Ask your professor for feedback. This won’t always be possible, but sometimes your professor will be willing to give you feedback before you turn the paper in, especially if it’s a term paper or capstone project.

Professors often build this feedback into the assignment by setting separate due dates for a proposal, a draft, and a final version. But even if they don’t, it never hurts to ask for feedback. The worst they can say is no.

Find and Remove Plagiarism

Once you finish the entire proofreading and checking phase, the last thing you have to do is find and remove plagiarism in your research paper. Plagiarism has a lot of consequences, and you have to make sure that your research paper is entirely free of it.

To do this, you must first use a plagiarism checker to find all the plagiarized parts. Once found, you can either remove them or give the required accreditations.

Give-up Perfectionism

As an academic person, you strive for accuracy and precision. You don’t want to provide invalid statements. You don’t want to overinterpret your findings, and you don’t want readers to consider your paper as faulty, incorrect, or flawed. Therefore, you tend to look for perfectionism in your writing to be on the safe side.

But very few perfect papers have been published! Most papers are good and solid; if you intend to write the ideal paper, it will cost you a lot of time and energy. And there’s probably no need for it. A paper that attempts to get everything 100% right is never finished. So it’s better to accept some limitations to your work to get it written, published, and read by peers.

Use a Citation Generator

Adding citations is the worst, especially when you spent hours writing a paper and are over it. If you don’t want to spend further hours paging through some arcane style manual, do yourself a favor and use a citation management/generation tool.

Citation Management Tools

My favorite is Zotero, which allows you to keep track of research sources and even has a browser extension to pull the citation info from a library catalog web page. But I also have friends who prefer EasyBib. It doesn’t matter which one you use–just pick one and watch your citation worries evaporate.

That said, it doesn’t hurt to glance at your citations before submitting, as these tools aren’t perfect (especially for digital sources).

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