If you want to avoid taking the life of innocent trees, or old rags or flax plants, you can submit you paper via e-mail. This has the advantage of being very fast, so that your instructor can put off responding even longer (though he shouldn't). Here are some rules for electronic submissions:

1. Send your paper as an attachment. This makes it easier for your instructor to save the file to a folder.

2. Save your file in an acceptable format. If you have the latest Microsoft Word, you must save your document in something other than the default file format (the *.docx), since no one else in the world will be able to open that file, except other people with the latest version of Word. Microsoft Word is pervasive (in the earlier *.doc format), and though it is the standard at several institutes of higher education, THIS instructor does not own a copy of Word and could not run it if he did. It is best to save your paper in an open format, one that can be read and edited in any wordprocessing program. The Open Document Format created by the OASIS group is a good bet. If you use Free Software like Abiword or OpenOffice, this is the default format. Plain text (ASCII, .txt) is fine, but you may lose formatting information, and things like foot or endnotes. HTML is better, but you might want to check the output in your webbrowser before sending, as some things might not transfer. Rich text format (.rtf) is supposed to preserve much of the formatting, etc., between different proprietary formats, and might be a good choice. If all else fails, your instructor can probably deal with Word .doc files, but at some moral cost. He can also handle WordPerfect files. Microsoft Works files (.wps) are not acceptable, as I have not been able to convert them to anything readable.

3. Name your file descriptively. "philosophy_paper.doc" doesn't cut it (I have a lot of those already!). We need your name, or at least your last name, the course or CRN, and some description of the assignment (biblio, draft1, etc.).

4. Ask for confirmation! It is your responsibility to make sure your instructor has recieved your paper. With email the only way to be sure of that is to request a reply. If you get one you know that you did not send your paper to the wrong address, or that your message or attachment were not filtered by anti-spam software, or that you have a virus or that you did not send your paper in a suitable format.