Is five days enough to rewrite a rejected 10-page paper?

Yes, five days is absolutely enough time to rewrite your ten-page paper, even with your tight schedule, but you have to be highly strategic about how you spend those evening and weekend hours. Since this is for a transfer English composition class, the professor is likely looking for structural coherence and proper academic integration rather than a complete, from-scratch overhaul. You do not need to throw away your entire draft. Instead, you should view this as a targeted renovation where you preserve your strongest paragraphs and rebuild only the sections that the reviewer flagged as weak or off-topic. Imagine you are balancing your day job and get home at six in the evening to tackle this. On your first night, do not write a single new sentence; instead, color-code the reviewer’s feedback to separate major structural issues from minor citation errors. If the reviewer noted that your transitions are weak or that your sources do not support your thesis, you can spend your weekend blocks rewriting those specific paragraphs and adjusting your MLA in-text citations to match. By focusing your limited evening energy on the heaviest intellectual lifting first, you leave the final night solely for polishing your works cited page and running a quick grammar check. To make this manageable, start tonight by printing out the feedback and making a map of exactly which pages need rewriting so you do not waste time staring at a blank screen. Next, dedicate your first weekend block to fixing the core arguments and updating your source integration, making sure every quote actually supports your main points. Finally, use your last evening to read the paper aloud to check the flow and verify that your MLA formatting is flawless. If you break the work down this way, you will easily cross the finish line with a much stronger paper.