My mother ran into my 9th grade English teacher today.  Ah, Mrs. Creasy, giver of the one C on my high school transcript.  This woman had given me hell, or at least so I thought at the time.  But my point is not to wax on about that tough English teacher who ended up having some profound influence on me.  Mrs. Creasy was a memorable teacher, a good teacher, but she was not the teacher who turned my world upside down, although I know she did that for many of my classmates. What she did do was teach me to make notecards, those pesky little index cards covered with "important" quotations and bibliographic information, smudged with black ink fingerprints.  

I hated notecards.  They were a waste of time.  Why couldn't I just type everything up in a Word document?  Get with the times, Mrs. Creasy, I thought to myself. She explained the benefits of the notecards: we could shuffle them around as we organized our research papers.  We could lay them on the kitchen table to get a big picture idea of our argument.  Whoopie, I thought.  But I had no say in the matter, and I was required to keep making notecards throughout high school. The entire English department swore this was important for college.  But you know what?  I never made a single notecard in college.  What was point, when I could just copy and paste things around on my laptop?  I made it through my courses just fine.  

Well, today, I ate my words.  I have a twenty-page paper for my MFA program hanging over my head.  I have never written a research paper of this length (I think fifteen pages has been my max).  I have no clue how I am going to focus my argument; all I know is which books I plan to use.  When my mother called to tell me she saw Mrs. Creasy, everything I learned in 9th grade came flooding back--the good, the bad, and the tedious.  And a lightbulb went off in my head. Notecards!! And so, I pulled out my old MLA handbook, and I started to make notecards.  I still have no idea where I am heading with this paper, but the notecards are at least making me feel as though I have a plan, which may just be half the battle.