In a land far, far away, at a magical place called college, there once lived a student named Anna. Anna had spent many tiresome hours researching and writing a term paper for one of her freshman college classes (hours she’d rather have spent hanging out with her friends!).
Later, when Anna was a sophomore, she was assigned a term paper that covered the same topics that she had researched and written about in her freshman term paper.
“Yes!” Anna thought to herself. “I already have most of the sources—this won’t take long to write!”
If Anna could re-use some of the sources she had compiled freshman year, then she would save herself valuable research time. So, about two weeks before the due date, when it was time for Anna to begin writing her paper (OK, it was more like a few days before the due date), she opened her bedroom’s closet door to pull out the plastic container where she stored papers from previous classes. She carefully opened this chest of information and began sifting through its academic treasures: the program for an interpretive dance performance she had watched for her “Beginning Tap Dance” class, notes for an essay on The Phantom of the Opera, articles about Mariah Carey for her “Stars and Star Makers” class . . . there were dozens of class papers. Unfortunately, none of the sources for that freshman paper were in the container.
“This is OK,” Anna told herself. “It’s just a minor setback. I can use the paper’s works cited page to find the sources’ publication information, which will still save me time. This is still better than researching from scratch.”
Anna quickly hopped over to her computer. She logged in and began searching through the folders on her desktop. After searching through the folders, she performed a search through the entire harddrive. She typed in dozens of variations of the title and subject of the paper—she even typed in the instructor’s name and date. Nothing.
“Aaahh,” cried Anna. “Where’s my wonderful (stupid!) paper?” And then (like suddenly remembering something embarrassing you did the night before) Anna regretfully realized she had deleted the paper before the school year had started.
“Woe is me (WTF!),” Anna sighed (shouted) to herself. “If I had saved my sources and the paper, then I wouldn’t have to go to the library this weekend (I’m a stupid idiot!).
The moral of this story: It’s worth saving your papers and their sources, because they could save you valuable time when you have to write papers in the future.