I had to stop this because if I sit down to just write whatever comes to mind, I'll be writing for 3 days straight with an ever increasingly chaotic storyline that is beyond incoherent after a certain point once the sleep deprivation really hits. If there ever was a good idea in it, it's now impossible to find even when edited down.
Ngl, the intro would make it an automatic pass for me. The rest could be shit, and I'd still give then whatever the bare minimum grade to be a pass because it's succinct, accurate, and honest.
Writing extemporaneously for 8 pages about whatever you want and writing 8 pages of an academic paper for an AP Composition final are two very different activities. Trust me, I pretty much exclusively wrote my papers the night before and there's just no way for to shit out that much bullshit and have it all be coherent, well-constructed, and engaging. It'll either be a confused, wandering mess or it will be unbearably repetitive. Or both. And no matter what, I'm certain it would be overwritten.
Have you ever been in a writing group? If so, our experiences have differed.
It isn't all fiction. Depending on the group, it may not be fiction at all. Part of the point of doing them is to hone your skill and your craft (which are related, but not exactly the same). When you're doing research and reporting, or working for a magazine, you'll often need to quickly absorb information, translate it into language appropriate for the audience, and crank it out with short deadlines.
Now, I didn't personally do any journalism at all, but I did do some research and reporting as a side gig. Ideally, you take notes and have references and all, but the core of what you do is hoovering information and regurgitating it, much like when doing a book report, or an essay for a class. There's some of that, that you get better at with practice, where the results are going to improve over time, but the core ability to think on the go, start typing to crank out the basics and then refine, that's something you have to have a baseline with.
The intro they had reads like someone that has the knack for it. They're making a coherent statement that informs the reader of what they can expect, while conveying the limitations of the project itself. Someone that can do that, can type out 8 pages and it be a solid first draft. Might not be something that merits a top score, but it's definitely going to be worth a passing grade, imo. And, as I said, the bare minimum of passing. If the rest is junk, that's all they get.
I'm not even that good at it. But that didn't stop me from essentially cranking my papers out in high school and college like you did. Just suck up the reading, then churn it out. Never got below an average grade, and usually got respectable scores. Wouldn't pass muster in a post-graduate setting, or professional one, but it'll do for everything up to that level.
See, I could edit that comment down to one paragraph easy. There's no way to write 8 pages of a book report in one night without being unendingly repetitive and unnecessarily verbose.
You just have to dump a few bullshit paragraphs and stuff it with big words that make you sound smart and hope no one actually reads it.:
Are you kidding, yes you the reader, are you having a chuckle at this tomfoolery of an essay. This paper is eight pages. E I G H T fucking pages of rambling bullshit. I'm in fact so sure that you have scrolled past this section without even firing a single reading neuron as I have not fired one writing this. The claim of one night is also highly inconstant. One night is defined in this station 6-12 hours of uninterrupted writing. I assure you I spent as little time as possible stringing incoherent filler together to pad out this essay. I can in fact write out an entire page of convincing words that are truly barren and hollow as the hope I have in the future. I think that if you write more pages of text than is necessary to covey the idea, you are only fulfilling an arbitrary requirement. I am hoping that you found my writing agonizingly empty and intellectually hostile both in a meta and literal level offending both the fiction reader and the physical reader of this comment. That arbitrary requirements will only demand and necessitate filler and inflate a precise and well written idea to the size of a boated pig in a McDonalds dumpster. Perhaps that pig will by chance encounter this very essay.
In conclusion, I have no strong feeling on the topic and do consider all opinions on the topic trite and trivial. I also do observe, against my best temporal interest, that this writing task assumes I am a man too deluded to break a topic down into 2-5 coherent sentences...