Intervention IV: Outlining for Winners

I have really changed my outlining tune in the past five years or so (what does an "outlining tune" sound like? Brief and unimaginative, I guess. Anyway). If you'd asked me how I wrote a paper up until 2007, I would have given you the 1989-era version I learned in high school, which, don't get me wrong, results in a very serviceable paper that pretty much writes itself:

1. Go through primary source and copy 5-15 quotes from it out onto 3x5 index cards. (Seriously! I did this in 2005!!!).
2. Repeat for secondary sources if necessary, on different-colored index cards if possible.
3. Shuffle index cards into "paper-writing" order--i.e., arrange either the primary-source quotes according to chronology or the secondary-source quotes according to theme or thing they have in common, and then stack them like this: one quote from the primary, a group of 3-4 from secondaries that relate, repeat.
4. Copy down everything that the index cards say in the order they say it onto a Word document, and as you do so, add headings according to subject, along with a sentence or two of the beginning of an argument.
5. Ecce outline!!!

This is a terrific system, if all you have to write is an outline. In fact, I learned it in high school when all we had to do for a research project was turn in a stack of index cards and an annotated outline. However, if you actually have to write a paper, or Lord help you a dissertation, then this is actually a time-inefficient and bad system that will suck up extra days of your life and result in a really unimaginative paper where your own insights are controlled by other people's and which contains no room for crazy tangents--which, like it or not, are (in a rough draft, at least) the stuff of original argument that makes papers good.

So if you would like to write one of the following:

1. an imaginative paper
2. a paper in a big ol' hurry

Then I'd actually recommend this anti-outlining technique instead. Again, if your professor or adviser insists on an outline, you can use the method above, but you can also use the method below, which is probably faster and actually ends up with far more of your paper written. For smaller papers, I stick to my non-outlining guns: instead, just use one of the other tutorials on how to write a coherent paragraph and how to have one interesting idea, and turn in whatever you have; I guarantee it will be just as good, if not better, as someone's index-card extravaganza.

For larger papers (graduate seminar papers, undergraduate lengthy research papers for upper-level classes, theses and dissertations):

The annotated bibliography and close reading. This two-pronged attack method is particularly effective if you must write multiple drafts as it produces an incredibly imaginative first draft that can then be polished later--or, if you're an undergraduate, a "final" draft with a really interesting angle rather than well-organized but dead piece of rehashed garbage. But, let me warn you, it does take actual work and results in possibly the best and deepest understanding of your sources you're able to have. Here's how you do it:

1. Get your primary source in front of you and go through it excruciatingly slowly (preferably more than once, but if you're an undergrad, once is fine). Limit yourself to the quotes you take down, but every time something strikes you in the text as especially interesting, even if you have no idea why, copy it down onto a Word document (with citation, OF COURSE). 
2. Then, the second you copy the quote down, directly after it, do a 100-200 word freewrite of exactly what you find interesting about it, whether that seems relevant or not. ANYTHING that comes to your mind. Do not stop typing until you reach 100 words, no matter what they say.
3. Repeat until you get all the way through the book or to the amount of quotes you need if you're an undergrad or a grad student still in coursework. If you're writing a diss, suffer through the whole damn thing. Three times, preferably--but ONCE IS ENOUGH if you are really pressed for time, no overwhelmsies!
4. Now, take your secondaries and go through them one by one, making an annotated bibliography. Take the title and author down (flesh it out later, don't disrupt your momentum, this is CRUCIAL!), and then read through until you get the gist of their argument. Then write yourself an abstract of their gist. Then read through the rest of it, taking down 1-10 quotes, depending on how important they are (10 quotes for "marquis" names that could be primaries themselves: Adorno, Benjamin, etc., 5 for big-name working scholars like Gail Hart (shout-out!!!), 1-3 for randos like me. After you take down each quote, react to it in 1-2 sentences.
5. Repeat until you get the necessary number of sources (5 for a minor undergrad paper, 10 for an undergrad term paper, 10-15 for a graduate seminar paper depending on whether you're on quarters or semesters, 30-40 for a dissertation chapter or professional essay). THEN STOP.
6. Congratulations. You will notice you've done most of your research, and actually written more than enough words to cover the length of your paper! Now all you have to do is shuffle the order, string them together and clean it up, and that you can do by...
7. Creating a VERY ROUGH outline that is more of a list, where you group your imaginative research into things it has in common (rather than creating an outline FIRST that you can't possibly conform to once you really start going), and then create one- or two-sentence headings.
8. If you must turn in a clean outline, summarize each section's rough-writing by explaining whom you've used and what you've talked about (make sure to drop a few names, leave one quote in), and then, saving your document as a DIFFERENT document, delete all your roughwriting. These summaries will actually turn into your topic paragraph for each section, so you still haven't wasted any time.

The Key to (Academic and All) Success: Manipulation and Lies

I often find that the hardest part of writing a paper isn't actually writing it--once you get going, especially if you get one interesting idea, it kind of takes care of itself (so long as you know some tricks). Instead, the hardest part of writing a paper is actually sitting down to start it. So this Intervention will be about ways to trick yourself into sitting down to start it. Not tricking yourself into writing the whole thing, just tricking yourself into starting it at all. This past year I had a few students who just had tragic procrastination problems, and the issue was just getting them over that mental hump to START it, at which point it pretty much wrote itself.

So the larger picture is that for any paper shorter than 7 pages, you can write a passable (though not necessarily good) version in 2-3 hours provided that you type fast. BUT, you can't tell yourself this when you start, or else you will never start. Because for most of us, 2-3 hours of writing a paper sounds about as inviting as 2-3 hours of getting tased in the butt. Why start at all, if it's just going to be prolonged agony???

So here are some things to tell yourself instead. You'd think that it'd be hard to lie to yourself, but in my extensive experience with self-deception I find that oneself is actually the easiest person to lie to: "These pants just shrunk in the wash...5 years after I bought them." Or, "I'll do a full set of bench presses NEXT time I'm at the gym." Or, "I can make one paycheck stretch for five months." Ahem. Anyway, what I always tell my students is, "Academic success is the result of an intricate web of self-manipulation and self-deception," and I mean it. Do you think I finished my PhD in 5 years (that, tragically, is extremely fast) by sitting down every day and saying, "All right, well, time to work on this 248-page paper that has to incorporate every important piece of recent scholarship on my subject and also contain a fully original argument that pushes the field but stays within disciplinary convention, now GO!!"? No! That kind of thinking is what gets you stuck in grad school for 17 years! I'm telling you, the following snippets of self-deception work, from the high-school essay all the way up to the doctoral thesis.

1. "I will just read this source for long enough to get two good quotes from it." The problem with densely-written academic prose, which most of us are forced to use for secondary sources, is that it is written so densely that every single sentence seems vitally, tragically important. Multiply that by a stack of 10 equally-dense books on your desk, many of them written in a non-English language, and you have a recipe for permanent deferral of research, which for many of us also means permanent deferral of work (though it shouldn't, see below). Though of course I hope you treat my work like that, don't. What you need to do for secondary sources is be able to paraphrase the author's main thesis, and react appropriately (i.e. with full knowledge of their context) to two good quotes. As soon as you can do this, proceed to skim the rest of the article unless it is so fascinating and entrancing it might change your life (Henry Sussman, I'm talking about you!), and before you know it you're through another source. And if you're a good quote-extractor and note-taker and summarizer, the notes you make about this sources should be able to be incorporated directly into your paper.

2. "100 words and I'm done for the day." It doesn't matter how much you hate writing--anyone, with ten minutes and a remotely interesting idea and equally remote grasp of the English language, can write 100 words. Just take one quote from your text and spend three sentences talking about it--one sentence that SUCCINCTLY rephrases what has happened in context, one sentence that highlights something interesting about that quote, and one that relates it back to whatever brilliant idea you are currently rocking in the paper. Guess what? I just wrote (approximately) 100 words just now, in this entry. YOU CAN DO THIS, no matter how little you want to work, no matter how little you have read, no matter how drunk/high/tired/harried you might be. The worst-case scenario is that you eke your paper out 100 words at a time over the course of a few days. What will probably happen is that once you get going, 100 will become 200, 300 and then 500 as you get into the rhythm of writing. The secret is to start with no pressure on yourself, with the understanding that papers do sometimes get written 100 words at a time, and that on a bad day (especially for you dissertaters out there!!!), 100 words can be the biggest victory in the world. At my worst and most depressed I eked out 50, 100 words at a time, and called it a "full work day" and resumed moping, and you know what? Not a good way to spend your life long-term, but those mothertruckers added up and soon enough I was Dr. Me.

3. "I'm just going to open this document up and LOOK at it." I'd like to amend my previous explanation that the hardest part of writing a paper (from a 2-pager to a dissertation) is starting to work. The hardest part is actually opening the document up on your computer and looking at it (if you still write longhand, you perplex me, but just think of the luddite equivalent of this). So if you tell yourself you're just going to open the piece UP to read through a few paragraphs for spelling and grammar, that is often sufficient to get you working. The important part of this, however, is to not beat yourself up if for a few times you do just open it up and proofread a few paragraphs and tweak a word here and there (ESPECIALLY you dissertation writers!). That is still keeping the work in sight and therefore in mind, and infinitely better than keeping it hidden in a faraway folder like I currently have the pigsty of a draft of a conference paper I'm due to give in less than three months (in professional-scholar time that is both forever and hopelessly insufficient). In a few days I'll be bringing it up "just to look at it," and then slowly employing the other two methods of deception and manipulation to get myself back on track to finish it.

Well, I hope this suggestion has been helpful, whether you're writing a one-page response paper due tomorrow or a 500-page dissertation due in three years. As always, email me or comment below if you have any questions, comments or funny procrastination stories to share.

Armchair Psychologist with Dr. Me: What's Your Motivation?

Although I am a doctor (not that kind of doctor), I am not a practicing therapist of any sort (though try telling that to the students who unload WTFTMI in their emails where all they really want is an extension). So the following attempts to plumb the depths of the student psyche are a mixture of anecdotal evidence, cursory research on the internet (thanks to the retro-fabulous academic dishonesty 1997-style HTML site at Old Dominion University), and my personal favorite, rampant unchecked speculation.

I think the latter quality is actually an excellent skill for early draft-writing in academic work, and definitely provided me with all of my weirdest ideas (some of which, funnily enough, are after extensive revision and despeculifying, being committed to scholarly-journal print as I type this!), but it often gets me into trouble at home ("I think I know why our neighbor plays his video games so loudly! It's because he's ENORMOUS, so because he's so Shaq-uesque, he must do everything loudly!"). Actual recent conversation.

Ahem. Anyway, rampant speculation is a "skill" I've had since I learned to talk: my earliest preschool teachers explained to my parents that, at 2.5, I already had "an explanation for everything." 31.85 years later, this holds true, and so now I am going to try to explain why, to the best of my untrained ability, students turn in work they didn't do and claim it as their own. Then, because this is Paper Intervention and not Paper Shame on You Plagiarists, I'll suggest viable, easy alternatives that appeal to exactly this kind of motivation/personality type.

TYPE 1. "I am a college 'customer,' here to pay to get a piece of paper that will get me a job." This is the #1 plagiarism cause on Old Dominion's site for a reason--with the current wisdom being that all good jobs need a college degree, and thus all high-school graduates need to have a college degree, even (and especially) if they hate (or think they hate) learning more than anything in the world. This is actually the reasoning my ex-husband used to justify embezzling money from his college engineering club, so it "excuses" all sorts of fraud, not just the academic kind. I can't believe I'm not married anymore, right? 

Anyway, it makes a lot of sense in today's overconsumerized environs that if a college education is just something you pay for like a triple-decaf mocha-coconut Frappucino with extra whip (BUT SKIM MILK, I'm watching my weight, obvz!), and you think of your prof like a barista whose job it is to take your money and turn it into a Frappucino while you text your friends ("Frappucino" here meaning "piece of paper claiming you are now the owner of a certain and specific body of knowledge"), then obviously asking you to get behind the counter and put all that crap into the blender yourself is going to make you all like wtf? So it's almost like you paid to turn in the paper, and it doesn't matter how you got it, right? I feel you, as nobody says anymore, and I'm not here to try to change your mind about how you feel about college. However:

• REBUTTAL. A potential one, at least. So, back to the Starbucks analogy. When you pay $7 for that glorified milkshake, you are entering into a miniature contract with the barista and with Starbucks as an institution: you are paying for a certain mixture of ingredients (or, as RHONJ Teresa would say, "ingrediences") to be added to their proprietary SuperBlender with ice, etc etc. If they took your money and then served you a festering pile of dog doo instead, you'd be all like, DOUBLE WTF? This isn't what I paid for. And that's what you might want to remember in college. Just like it's not Starbucks' purview to serve festering piles of dog doo, it is not our purview to "sell degrees." If we "sell" you a degree, that degree becomes nothing more than a faceless coin masquerading as professional "currency" (that's a reference to NIETZSCHE, bitches, "On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense," various editions, I use the GERMAN six-volume Werke, so booya). If we can give you anything--a festering pile of dog doo, for example--and call it a "degree," then, just like at Starbucks, you are not getting your money's worth.
• EASY SOLUTION. Instead of wasting your money on a paper you didn't write that will thus garner you a degree that is worth as much as a festering pile of dog doo, spend that money on more coffee and an industrial-strength pair of earplugs or noise-canceling headphones. Then put those babies on and promise yourself to devote 15 minutes more a day to studying than you now do--then once you've done 15, do 30, 45, and an hour (incrementally). Each time you do, think about it this way: "I owe it to myself to get my money's worth out of my college education. I owe it to myself to be the person that diploma says I will be. I am WORTH working on, to get smarter and better." All right, I have to stop before I barf.

TYPE 2. "This class isn't in my major, and therefore it is a serious grade-A waste of my time." This is, more or less, a variation on Type 1, with the difference that while Type-1 students believe ALL college is a waste of their time, Type-2 students believe anything outside their course of study is a waste of time. After all, if you are going to college to study Animal Husbandry and they're forcing you to take a year of French, it's almost like they deserve to get a year's worth of bad Google translations for making you do something so stupid.

• REBUTTAL: Remember that unless you go to one of those loosey-goosey colleges with no requirements (in which case: enjoy Hampshire and please don't drop out), when your college or university plans courses of study, they spend just as much time planning what to require EVERYONE to take, or what to require certain majors to take as breadth requirements. They are not making you take French because they want to keep the French department in business (in fact, universities seem to enjoy closing foreign-language departments these days), and enjoy torturing you. They are making you take French (or any foreign language) because they know that knowing more than one language does the following: 1) makes you better at English and thus a better communicator 2) makes you more competitive on the global marketplace, which, guess what, is THE marketplace now, 3) makes your brain better at learning all sorts of stuff (there have been studies). The same can be said for "forcing" foreign-language majors to take math (I wish they'd made me take more math in retrospect!), "forcing" business majors to take literature (EGAD, being well-read and great at formulating arguments will never make you a better business negotiator!!!), etc. 
• SOLUTION. One day when you're bored, Google all the people in the world who got their bazillion-dollar idea or life's passion or met their spouse in a class they didn't think they "had" to take. Then throw yourself into yours and think about how making yourself a dynamic, multifaceted person can allow you to put "dynamic, multifaceted person" on your future resume--and start scouring your classroom for hotties. Nobody says "hottie" anymore, do they? Well, that's 90s slang for "attractive person," so do that.

TYPE 3. "I'm overworked/desperate/prone to mental blocks and I waited until the last minute and NOW IT'S TOO LATE and I HAVE TO." This is by far the most common reason students commit fraud (buying a "custom essay") or plagiarism. As someone who unsuccessfully employed the "I'll wake up early before class and do the reading" ruse 900 times in college (THAT NEVER WORKS, does it? I never learned!), I am a bona fide expert on this. And yet, all anyone ever seems to do to "remedy" this situation is tell you to start earlier next time. That causes despondency and a vicious cycle of more dishonesty in my experience. What I wish more profs or teachers would tell their desperate students instead is:

• "Yes, you may have an extension...for a slight deduction that will not, I repeat, will not, be a big deal in the long run."
• "Just scrawl something out and turn it in--it will probably be better than 60% of what I get anyway." Sad, but true.
• "You're an undergraduate for crying out loud--nobody expects Harold Bloom. And, actually, nobody even likes Harold Bloom." 

• "You would actually be better off not turning in anything than turning in something you didn't write yourself." This one is super-true. A no-show may get you a zero, but it will never get you expelled.

Of course, my "easy solutions" to Type-3 appear on this very blog as all the Interventions I've done so far (go to the link bar on your right and take your pick based on how desperate you are!).

Well, I hope you've enjoyed your time on the couch and I'm sorry you can't get extra credit for doing all this reading that isn't even for your major. I mean, you're overscheduled and paying my salary, so it's the least I can do for you, right?

Come-to-Secular-Public-School-Version-of-Jesus: PLAGIARISM HURTS.

Happy Memorial Day! As you remember the sacrifices the brave men and women of the US Armed Forces make for us every day, think about what a dick move it is to use that precious, freedomy freedom to cheat in school.

Here's a litany of people and institutions academic dishonesty hurts--prepare to shed a tear! WARNING: this is by far my most rambly and rambunctious YouTube. The tutorials don't generally run like this. And eventually I'll start adding some production values to these. Right now? One take, and IT SHOWS.

How to Write a Coherent Paragraph About Anything

Grüße, Paper Interventionists!

Yes, that's right, I speak German, at least better than Lady Gaga does (no offense meant to Her Gagaship, whom I adore).

Anyway, speaking of languages, I thought I'd offer a very brief crash course on how to write a coherent paragraph about anything. Granted, in the US, many academic-dishonesty horror stories come courtesy of ESL students in over their heads and driven to desperate measures (just like I must have been, to write that mixed-metaphor!).

However, in my (albeit limited) experience, the worst cases of I Can't Write a Coherent Sentence come from native speakers of English. (NB: A similar phenomenon comes courtesy of the anti-Spanish/whatever other language people might speak movement in the US, where I've seen more times than I can count the directive "YOUR IN AMERICA SPEAK ENGLISH." As my far-better half says, "You know, maybe English isn't for you. You should try another language and see if you speak it better." ANYWAY. I don't want to lose the Xenophobic demographic here--I'm all for your linguistic xenophobia as long as you yourself know the difference between your and you're.)

At any rate, the following holds true for you if you are:

1. a native speaker of English who doesn't like to write, or never got taught how because your school spent 12 years preparing you for standardized tests and instilling a blood-deep hatred of the written word;
2. an intermediate ESL speaker whose written work needs some help;
3. a paper-writer who enjoys learning time-saving techniques that work for all papers, ever, regardless of subject matter.

In a classic college paper, there are basically four types of sentence you should be writing:

1. The sentence that introduces an idea, author or problem, we'll call it I: "In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gabsty, the figure of the optometrist is highly complex and deserving of a close reading."
2. The sentence that works with or around your data (or "evidence"), we'll call it E: "When Gatsby tells Daisy to 'Move, b*tch, get out of the way,' Fitzgerald has revealed his character's gift for both misogyny and time-travel." (Oh, by the way, all sample insights re: The Great Gabsty are flagrantly made up).
3. The sentence (group) that does a "maybe, but"--(presents and debunks an antithesis); we'll call it an  M: "Scholars such as Draco Malfoy have argued that Fitzgerald's portrayal of automobiles paints him as an anti-car Marxist. However, a closer look at how Gatsby depicts the automobile will prove that this is not the case."
4. The sentence that sums sh*t up; we'll call it an S: "From a closer look at the preceding passage, Gatsby's stark opposition to the hippopotamus becomes clear, as does Fitzgerald's portrayal of hippopotami as anti-Modernist villains."

Every paragraph should be a careful mix of these sentences, one that pays special attention to the placement and ratio. 

Here are some good placements/ratios: 

1. For a short (<5 page) paper, do IMEES. That is a classic five-sentence paragraph that should fill up one-half to 3/4 of a page, contains one introductory idea, ONE maybe-but to start things off, two pieces of evidence (one small, one larger is the best method), and ONE summing-sh*t-up. 
2. For a longer paper, a good pattern is IMEMEES, or even IMMEEES, where you give dissenting voices a bit more authoritah, and thus give yourself more time to argue with them and take up space.

"That's great," you might be thinking, or, if you were born after 1994 (the year I graduated from high school!), "lolz gr8ballz," you might be "thinking." 

And yet you might also wonder: "How do I MAKE these sentences sound right? When I close my eyes and mix up all the jargon I've ever heard and then open them and right-click on MSWord Thesaurus a few times, it never turns out like I want it to." I hate it when that happens. Look, I'm not going to lie, learning to write a really good, beautiful, elegant English sentence takes work. But, the good news is that 99% of perfectly-serviceable college and high-school essays (B+ range, we'll say) are not written in really good, beautiful, elegant English sentences. They are written in a way that is sufficiently coherent, and that is really all you have to do. I can't teach you how in 2 minutes like I'd like to, but I can offer you some tips that I guarantee will work better than closing your eyes and using MSWord Thesaurus:

1. For a good I sentence, first ask your prof or teacher if you may use the first-person in your paper. 99% of them will tell you not to, and that is a shame, because a lot of the best professional scholarship (and mine, for what it's worth) uses the first-person. On the off-chance that you are in my class and I say "go for it!", write your I sentence in the first person and put yourself into it. Use a template like this one: "In the following paper I will argue [SOME INTERESTING THING] about the [book/novel/data X by Y]." If you're not in my class and your prof hates the first-person pronoun, don't despair. A good introductory sentence only needs to have the following qualities: CLARITY, SHORT-TASTICNESS, SPECIFICITY. Make it short, clear and about something specific, and you're golden. "F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby might not seem like a book about optometrists and hippopotami, but the following paper will argue that it is." Boom. Breaking it down even more, for those of you who like mathesque things: [Author + "'s" + Title of Primary Source] + [interesting verb like "demonstrates" or "proves" or "evokes"--look up a list of about 15 good academicy verbs that basically mean "says" or "means" or "is" and alternate using them] + [interesting idea, see Hail-Mary Pass Tutorial].
2. For a good E sentence, always remember that if you are quoting something four lines or longer, you have to offset it--that means indent it about 1/2" on each side, and put a page number in parentheses after it. If you are quoting something shorter, you can just put it in quote marks, but it has to be made into a part of the language around it. When in doubt (when you suspect you've done a Quote Dump), read your E sentence aloud to yourself. Would someone NOT reading along understand it? The best way to do this is to insert a verb ending in "ing," a comma or colon (for more emphasis if you want it), and then your quote. For example: "Gatsby's fear of hippopotami becomes most evocative after he comes home from his first big hippo-party, saying, 'Man, do I hate hippos. They scare the everloving crap out of me' (Fitzgerald 56)." You can also do the -ing trick for an offset quote, but you always have to use a colon in that case.
3. An M sentence(s) should always go "maybe-but" as quickly as it can. It should look like this: ["Maybe" phrase: "it may seem as if," "popular scholarly opinion seems to agree that," "although this appears to be..."] + [period or semicolon] + ["But" phrase: "However, this is not actually the case."]
4. A good S sentence briefly refers to what you were just talking about OR just uses the word "thus" or "therefore," and then goes on to reaffirm a point you are trying to make: "Therefore, we can now see more effectively how deeply-held Gastby's fear of hippopotami is."

If you are not a natural writer, your best bet is to think of yourself as filling out a template. DO NOT OUTLINE (takes too long! ruins the creative impulse!); instead, just begin each paragraph with a blueprint: IMES, IES, IEES, IMMES (that was a blueprint for a 5-page paper, btw, feel free to use it, it's a good one!).

Well, it's Memorial Day weekend here in America--that means that most of you are thinking about BBQing stuff and getting your best all-white ensembles back from the dry-cleaners (they will go GREAT with that spray-tan, of course), and not about writing papers. But it's my hope that for those of you on the quarter system who will be blowing off writing a paper in favor of barbecue-consumption and white-wearing, this might help you when timing is suddenly and unforgivingly of the essence. 

Intervention III: Replace Cheatin' Impulses with Writin' Tricks

The following Intervention is for anyone who has ever considered doing one of the following (and, lest I need to over-repeat it, I am NOT judging you on past transgressions or current impulses, I'm just trying to help):

1. Cut-and-pasting or cut-and-rephrasing from an online source
2. Paying your hard-earned money to some schmuck to write a "custom paper" for you
3. Looking at a friend's paper and "borrowing some ideas"

Here are some easy, reasonably fun and FAST tricks that can take the place of these impulses, will work better, and--BONUS!--are guaranteed not to get you expelled.

1. Instead of cut-and-pasting from an online source, just quote that source and footnote it. If you quote it directly, put quote marks around it, and if you paraphrase it, just add a li'l footnote superscript and then explain where you got it in the footnote. WORST-CASE SCENARIO: Your teacher or prof gets mildly annoyed that you went for the most obvious possible interpretation, but that annoyance is cancelled out by his/her relief that you actually attributed the source. BEST-CASE SCENARIO: In attributing/analyzing this source, even if it's something rubetastic like Dr. Spark, you will actually gain some insight into the material and the rest of the paper will be fast/easy to write, and all future papers will be, too. Because here's a secret: once you get the basic nuts-and-bolts of writing a paper down, all papers are basically the same and you can just become a paper-writing MACHINE. If you want to take it to the next level, you can also actually use that source the way you're supposed to--that is, get some insight from it and then go back into the text and use that insight to yammer about some more quotes.
2. When Ed Dante, the infamous "shadow scholar" who made about the same salary as a senior-level paralegal writing other people's papers (sometimes working on up to 20 a day), gets several hundred dollars' worth of your money to write a "custom paper," he spends about half an hour trolling Amazon and Google books and then plugs the fastest and most mediocre insights he can into a stock set of premade "analysis" phrases. The result, as he is quick to remind you, is a decidedly mediocre-at-best essay that Dante himself reminds you he does not revise. This schmuck can write your paper in 45 minutes. So here is my question: WHY. CAN'T. YOU? You can. Instead of paying a ton of your (or your parents') hard-earned dough to an odious paper mill, just churn out a paper-mill paper yourself. Mimic Dante's exact dubious practice--it works for him, and it will work for you, the difference being that this mediocre work is YOUR mediocre work and will thus not get you expelled. Craft yourself a couple of craptastic template paragraphs, and then customize them to work with the text you're supposed to have read (if you haven't read it, see my Hail-Mary Pass tutorial). Avoid self-plagiarism (also potential troub-troubs) by treating your template paragraphs as just that, templates, and allowing them to bloom into unique paragraphs in each paper you use them in (if you re-use stock literary-analysis phrases like "a careful consideration of ______ in the context of _______" that's not self-plagiarism, just a habit). If you can't write a coherent English sentence, just do an incoherent version of Dante's schtick and at very least you'll get a "see me" and a sympathetic referral to the campus writing lab. I'm going to do a YouTube tutorial that's a super-crash-course on writing a coherent English sentence soon, but obvs. that's going to take some magic and finessing. 
3. It is totally OK to work together with a friend as long as you attribute him or her in a footnote--unless you have a hardass prof who demands you write your paper in a vacuum, which definitely happens these days, but that's a rant for another time. Provided that you are actually allowed to have outside-human contact during your paper-writing process, then by all means put your heads together. Look at your friend's paper, see which of her ideas are actually really good, and then offer your OWN take on them in your paper--you'll be surprised how easy it is to take a friend's idea and then REACT to it. Then just footnote your friend: "I would like to thank the my insightful roommate Rob Pattinson for allowing me to proofread his paper, during which time I noticed his interesting take on this text. While I think his ideas about X and Y are great, my own take differs from his, in that I X, Y and Z." Like I said, some profs are real hardasses about this now, but I personally welcome collaboration between classmates because that is how some of the best ideas around come into existence.

Again, I can't emphasize enough that I am offering you this guidance out of pure self-interest on your behalf. Sure, I don't think you should cheat and I think there is a special place in the 9th Circle for paper-mill employees like, ahem, Mr. Dante, and the people who make them rich, but this is not about that. This is about showing you that you CAN write your own paper in less time than it takes to track one of these paper-mill idiots down, and definitely in less time than it takes to do a cut-and-paste chop job from the Internet. You don't have to know what you're talking about to write a passing paper any more than Ed Dante does, and it will actually take LESS time and effort to crap it out yourself than it does to search the Internet for stuff to steal, or explain to the Ed Dantes of the world what they need to do to write it for you.

Common Mistakes that Tank a Paper Grade--and What to Do Instead!

Check out my newest vide-i-e-i-e-i-os, that tell you about some common mistakes (almost) all students make at least once in their venerable careers...

And what do do instead of them!

Good luck!