I want to know what the best way to write an essay is.
You'd think after three years floating around an English degree I might've worked it out, but sadly, no.
Some people suggest that you work non-stop for 50 minutes and then you take a break for 17 minutes and you keep doing this until all of your words are out on the page.
Others suggest working for the sum of your age plus three in minutes and then break for half an hour.
I don't know about any of this because I don't have the willpower or the self-discipline to actually commit to working in these patterns.
There must be a way, though, so I've rounded up some of the more traditional methods (as exercised by those nearest and closest to me) and taken it upon myself to judge passively their efficacy.
The first of these methods is the ''don't write your essay, but also don't think about/do anything else either'' method.
This usually involves lying on your bed in your most comfortable clothes, tucked up beneath a salmon-coloured blanket with tears streaming down your cheeks.
You're crying because you don't want to write the essay and you feel as though you have been hard done by because you really want to do something else but even shifting one toe off your bed produces enough guilt to take down a Clydesdale.
A method such as this is best accompanied by plenty of snack foods and a good internet connection.
The internet connection is for when you've a burst of energy and open up Facebook to look at updates you don't really care about just to get back at your essay for getting you down.
Eventually, you will only have a limited number of hours left before your deadline, so you'll waste half an hour in the shower.
Then you will crouch over your laptop and hyperventilate until you've vomited out something that looks like an essay, feels like an essay, but smells an awful lot like desperation.
The following method is slightly more productive but equally as soul-destroying.
This is the ''do a little bit of work (but not really) every day for about a week before your assignment is due'' method.
Mostly what this involves is a whole lot of telling yourself that you're doing fine because you read 300 words of an article vaguely related to your topic.
And well, you sort of know what your topic might be.
You've been thinking about it, after all, and that counts for something.
Inevitably, the night before your project is due you sit down to put everything together and realise your thesis is fundamentally flawed and you have to start all over again.
In order to get through the evening you'll need at least one litre of some kind of caffeinated beverage, a soda perhaps, or maybe coffee, and some halfway decent mood lighting.
Usually the caffeine/light combination will make you feel quite ill and even though you might have trudged to the end of your word count with some time to spare, you'll have to spend the next three days sleeping it off.
The final method is perhaps the most tragic.
This is the ''you didn't realise everything was due in on the same day and now your life is over'' method.
In this instance, sleep typically becomes an impossibility.
So you have to ration it out.
Maybe you can take a couple of hours after midnight, fully clothed and tangled in your duvet on your unmade bed only to wake up to the light still blazing overhead and your lips stuck together by some kind of stress glue.
If you're going to get through three or four things at once, you're going to need intravenous food and a 100W light bulb.
Speed-reading and an entry-level understanding of complex topics are a must.
Maybe what I actually want to know is if there is a way to write an essay that isn't inherently miserable.
I've got quite a lot of words to spit out in the next two weeks, so perhaps I will adopt a multi-method approach to see if I can find some kind of happy medium.
-Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
