Katrina said:

Hey,
I'm both a Sociology major and a procrastinator. My advice: do not rework a paper you've found online. If you can find it, the professor can also find it; with google it's extremely easy to identify plagerized work. Many professors check all their papers these days, and if it's discovered, most don't just give you a failing grade, but they report it to your school's academic board, which means you'll face expulsion or probation. I always thought those warnings were bullshit, but I've been in college for quite some time now, and have seen at least 5 students get busted for plagerism.

A 12 page paper by Thursday is completely do-able. Choose a topic that will yield a lot of articles (check to see if your school allows you to access databases such as EBSCO at home through the school's library website, and also use google scholar). For a basic outline of the topic, use Wikipedia. Use your textbook and see what topics in it you already know quite well and then enter those topics into google scholar and other databases and see what you get. Honestly, after choosing a topic that you feel you can write on already, without needing to read a bunch of outside sources you can just write what you already know and then use the articles you find to throw in random quotes where appropriate. Gathering the outside research won't take more than an hour, and once you get writing you can probably push out a page an hour--if you get stuck on a paragraph, just move on from it and go back to it later. Write anything, even if you think it's stupid, if it's relevant to the topic, it's probably not.

As for things like format, just use http://citationmachine.net/ to format your works cited and citations so you don't have to worry about them.

Also, here's a list on Wikipedia of sociological topics and links to their Wiki pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sociology_topics

If your stuck, feel free to PM me, I'm a former tutor/proofreader, and I'm going to be up until Thursday working on my own paper. I also apologize if this sounds preachy, it's the tutor in me.

i'm not planning to use the paper i found word for word. if none of the sentences in my paper are the same then they wont be able to find it online. I'm just using the paper i found to get topics and a general format. im getting all my own sources.