Debate between myself and a friend today. Twenty-five-page seminar class paper. Nose to the grindstone. Doesn't have to be done great. Just has to be done. I said that it can be done in a single productive weekend. She says no way.

What say you guys?

Yeah, it you are diligent, that's feasible. It won't be near publishable quality, and you'll be very stressed out the whole time.

Easily can be done over a weekend.

It also depends whether you already have a lot of the research done and/or know where you'll get source material. I'd dare say if you have all the material in place and just need to write it, you could probably actually write it in one day/night.

An hour per page, if you have the prep work done.

I wrote my 35 page journal comment in 3 days, including research.

If I've got all of my research done, I can write one in a couple of days. Wrote a 30 page appellant brief in a weekend. But it depends because usually I'll think of something else I'd like to throw in when I get into writing the paper and end up doing more research.

But if you ask me, it can definitely be done in a productive weekend.

I wrote a 26 page draft in 4 hours. It wasn't terribly good, but it was readable.

25 pages double spaced or single spaced?

My record is probably a 96 page single-spaced paper in a week. Normally I can crank out a page or two per hour, sometimes up to 4 or 5 if I'm on a roll.

On the 2L no motivation thread you can follow my process on pp 27-30 as I wrote 38 pages in around 30 hours (just writing/foot noting, research had largely been done, though I still did plenty).

Got 2nd highest grade in lawl school.

Page an hour, turn-in quality, having already conducted most research.

Are you joking? What was this paper for?

It was for an advanced economics class on bubbles, market failures and elliott wave theory.

20 pages in three hours. I honestly thought I was going to spontaneously combust.

Some of you guys are beasts. For me, I usually write a solid page per hour.

There was a rumor that someone typed out 100 pages for one of our 4 hour exams. I think I did the math and it was like 130 words per minute for 3 full hours - we had an hour where we couldn't type. The law school rumor mill...people will believe anything.

Either that or there is some prick with that dvorak keyboard

I did mine in 48 hours, including research, but poor research.

I think 3 days is the minimum for any 25-or-more-page piece of writing to be good, research included. If you're gunning for a B, it could probably be done in 36 hours.

Double spaced, just done but not great? 14 hours.

Single spaced, two 14 hour days.

Both of these assume I have done research beforehand. If not, add 3-5 hours to that.

With adderal, anything is possible.


IBEthicsnerds.

This is totally doable. If the research is done beforehand, you have plenty of time to write a good paper in that time.

I just wrote a 40 page first draft in 4 and a bit days, probably averaging 5 hours a day on it. It's terrible. But it got written. 25 pages nose to the grindstone is definitely doable.

In undergrad, I had a 20-page final, worth about 60% of my grade, due on May 10th of my senior year. I began it at 9 AM on March 11th. It took me 36 hours to read "To The Lighthouse" and "Between the Acts" by Virginia Woolf, and then write about 22 pages on her use of time and history in the broader context of the 1930s and the British Pageant Play. I think I did get 7 hours of sleep, plus 3 full meals.

I received an A- in the class even though my one actual assignment was turned in 2 days after the due date.

There are multiple possible takeaways:
1. English Literature classes are a joke at my undergrad (or everywhere)
2. It's possible to crank out enormous pages and pages if what you're writing is vague and only loosely tied to logic
3. Law school is about 96x harder than undergrad

All that being said... the argument section of my most recent brief ended up being about 3,200 words, or about 13 pages. All of that, including case research and whatnot, took me, I think, 29 hours between my rough draft and final paper combined, of which 10 hours were spent revising down to a very stringent word limit.

So. My guess: in a pinch, for legal writing, you can "produce" - that is, get the research for, plan, write, and revise - one page every 2 hours. Wouldn't recommend putting yourself in a situation where you need to do that... but whatevs.

so true.

I actually have like a month to do it from now, plus a couple days. But I'm a final semester 3L (with a job) who is just in that stage where I have to start knocking shit out and getting it off my plate.

Fifty hours seems reasonable when you include research, too. Problem with me is I start to burn out after a few hours on one thing, and especially packed into a single weekend.

I'm going to take this weekend and see how far I can get in about 25-30 hours I'm allotting. I'll report back.