5 possible excuses for turning in a late paper
Who out there hasn’t turned in a late paper before? I don’t want to toot my own horn, but there was that one trimester, while I was attending my Ivy League college, that did not see one single paper (in that entire span of four months) of mine delivered in a timely fashion. Sometimes you turn in a paper late. It’s not the end of the world. No one is going to die. Even you’ll live, after the anxiety of confronting your professor. Unlike in the real world, where deadlines are often inflexible and nonnegotiable, the academic world is one where things like deadlines exist in a more abstract, rather than absolute, sense.
Your professors and teachers get barraged with late paper requests. Trust me. More often than not, professors don’t even get asked in advance for an extension — papers merely find their way under their office door a week later, without explanation. Most of the time, these professors are graceful enough to accept the paper and overlook the time lapse, but sometimes they will dock your grade or talk to you sternly. They may even threaten to fail you. Therefore, the best thing to do, before turning in a late paper, is to ask for an extension in advance. Ask three days in advance, and if your professor denies your request, you know that the proper measure, at that point, is to suck it up and write the thing. However, if they do grant you your request: great! You’ve just landed yourself a few extra days to make your paper better.
Ergo, the key to landing an accepted extension is a really, really good excuse. Computer crashes, dead grandmothers, dead pets, food poisoning, and 24-hour bugs only get you so far. Be creative. You are the master of your own excuse, so why not make it as creative as possible? Here are 5 possible excuses for turning in a late paper. These can be modified, personalized, or eschewed altogether. The point is, these are excuses that you can use as inspiration for your own extension requests. Check them out.
5. You’ve been revising so much that you ended up destroying your paper through the editing process.
You wrote a paper, then in revising it, you warped the whole thing so much all you have left is a tangled, disorganized mess that refuses to make sense of anything you intended for — you have lost your paper through over-editing! Professors will identify with this, I’m sure, as they do a lot of writing in their own work, and you will prove to the professor (through your excuse) that you really have been working hard on their assignment, that you care, that you’re motivated, but perhaps just a little too much of all three.
4. You lost your bibliography and you have to go back and look up your sources again.
Losing a bibliography is actually a really credible excuse, because it happens to the best of us. And in academic writing, sources are crucial to good work. You don’t want to plagiarize (in college, you can actually get expelled for plagiarizing) so you need to catalog and identify your sources. Your professors will believe you. Or even if they have their doubts, they need to let you look up your sources, because even if your paper is 100% complete, without your sources you risk unintentional plagiarism.
3. Through your research, a new thesis presented itself.
A new thesis is a credible excuse, and an academically responsible one. You are merely being a responsible student and thinker, in refusing to write a paper on a faulty or tenuous thesis when you realized, through your research, that your thesis could not be supported with existing evidence.
2. You suddenly realized your interpretation of the work in question was incorrect, and you have to reread the original source.
So you read a novel for a class, and your professor wants you to write a paper on it. You can’t write a paper on a novel if your original interpretation is incorrect. If you suddenly realize that while reading A Clockwork Orange that you originally interpreted the novel as a support of a totalitarian justice system, you can’t possibly write a good paper without rereading the book and realigning your interpretation of the novel with something more intellectually sound.
1. You found the word psychologically disturbing and you have to restore balance to your psyche before you can get in any mode to write critically.
Calling a work offensive, or saying that it was so disturbing that you can’t write on it until getting your zen back, is a credible excuse for several reasons. First, it’s happened to the best of us. Who out there hasn’t read a book that’s left a haunting impression on them for days? When I first read In Cold Blood, for a class in college no less, I was so freaked out I couldn’t sleep well for days. If your professor wants you to write on a disturbing piece about war, race relations, murder, death of a loved one, or any other grave social injustice, maybe the best excuse is that it affected you too much for you to rationally or critically examine the work given the time frame. Needing a few extra days to let emotional or controversial material sit with you is a good idea, in any case, before writing impartially on any subject.
