3:30 A.M. finds me in front of a glowing computer screen yet again. I’m waiting for inspiration. My friends, kind enough to let me use their dorm room and their Macintosh, are asleep in their beds just feet away in the half-darkness, reaping the rewards of their wisdom: they haven’t waited until the night before like I have. I take swigs of Mountain Dew from a plastic mug; it’s the sweet nectar of the Gods of Last-Minute Paper Writing. No, make that bittersweet nectar -- the taste of sugary green goodness reminds me, with every swallow, that I’ve sentenced myself to another unnecessary all-nighter. I have few ideas and even less time…

The blinking computer cursor on an otherwise empty screen was the college version of the blank white page of my earlier years, before technology had taken us so far. But for me it was, in many ways, the same old problem. With early drafts of a paper rarely required, I came time and time again to a point where a significant portion of my grade rested on what was essentially a single night’s work. I usually left myself no option but to write in one long session on a computer - there weren’t enough hours remaining to compose a version on paper to be typed up afterward. And time and again, my method, such as it was, worked for me. I not only survived but prospered. But I sometimes wondered, and still wonder: this works, but am I progressing? Has my writing grown? Should it be possible to turn out an “A” paper in a night? What standards are being used to judge these papers? Do my desperate all-night writing sessions somehow, in ways I don’t understand, help me improve? How did I learn to write at a level that has helped me succeed up to this point?

My early writing education is mostly lost to my conscious memory, but I do think that regular reading, from a young age, of books of all sorts loomed large in that education. I remember a