the air

Every year at college and in high school, thousands of students engage in the so-called art of BS - otherwise known as bullshit. When someone says they BS’d a paper, do you have any idea what they mean? BSing a paper basically means that you wrote a paper without doing significant research or knowing the material very well. In order to successfully write a BS’d paper, you must also earn an excellent grade as well. Let’s face it, if you cannot earn a good grade on a BS’d paper, you are better off just doing the actual paper in a legitimate manner (i.e., do your research and write it effectively).

Skills Required

BSing requires three skills to be of utmost importance. It is important to remember that BSing preys upon your instructor’s inability to actually read the entire paper. However, a well written BS’d paper will actually make sense and appear to be well thought out. All good BS’d papers will have:

• Excellent grammar
• Excellent vocabulary
• Follow the rules

Write Right

We all learned English and many of us fell asleep whenever our teachers taught us the rules of writing. If you cannot write well, then how can you expect to write a well-written BS’d paper? If you cannot write well, now would be a great time to go out and buy a grammar book. It really doesn’t matter what book you buy as long as it contains grammar rules.

practice your grammar

Do you have a blog? If so, practicing your grammar on your blog is a great way to improve your new grammar skills. Many times, you may not have others crtiquing your work, but you can critique it yourself with a grammar book in tow. So you don’t have a blog? It might be a great time to start one. If you don’t want to, why not start a paper journal or something? In fact, you don’t need to write about your life or something about yourself. Just grab a newspaper article and write a review of the article. Try summarizing the article in your own words and try to explain it to someone else in writing. The goal of this exercise is to have you write using proper grammar, so it really does not matter what you write.

Choose Your Words Wisely

Nothing impresses an instructor than using big and complex words in your paper. This is where a thesaurus comes in handy. If you don’t have one, I highly suggest you buy one. I know the Internet has many free thesauruses, but you should always have one in print. Many times, you need to be able to remember complex words while away from your computer or thesaurus. The next best thing is to buy an SAT vocabulary book and memorize those words. The more you memorize the better off you will be. A sweet advantage of having an SAT vocabulary book is that many of those words can be used in everyday talk.

Follow The Prescribed Instructions

There is nothing worse than being told by an instructor that your paper did not follow the instructions and he/she cannot award you any points or gives you an incomplete. That is why it is extremely important for the good BS’er to follow all instructions carefully. If your instructor says that you must have five quotations in your essay from a particular book, then make sure you have at least five quotations from the said book. I have seen many students who BS a paper and simply fail to follow a simple instruction as “make sure you have a title page.” The end result is that they end up with a lower grade. This last rule is applicable to everyone, even if you are not into BS’ing. So always follow the rules.

BSing is not easy and should not be attempted unless you are willing to risk it all. It is possible that by BSing, you can be outed by your instructor and you could end up with a failing grade. With proper grammar and the correct use of “big” words, anyone has the ability to become a great writer. There is no substitute for writing a well-researched paper, but there are times in a student’s career where one must take shortcuts to get the job done. So good luck with your BS’ing adventures and let me know how it goes for you.

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