Word count quotas are one of the worst ideas in education. In real life, quotas are practically non-existent and word limits are everywhere. Teaching students to pad their writing to fill a quota is teaching them bad writing. I suspect this is the reason so much academic writing is bad.
I had a great English class in university where the professor agreed fully, and went so far as to really engage the class in doing the opposite. Instead of the 5-page minimum paper filled with flowery prose, it was the 2-page paper in which you concisely argue your point and leave it at that. A lot of the class really had difficulty adjusting their writing style to be concise and convincing instead of superfluously padding their point to meet a quota.
I'd love if this is something we saw more frequently in schools.
I had a fantastic high school English teacher who had word count maximums (that were generally pretty low: 500-1000 words) and graded based on how well-argued the point was. Really encouraged tight writing.
Coming out of high school, my writing was terrible. One of my history teachers assigned us ~10 page essays every other week. The class actually taught me pretty well to construct well-reason arguments with supporting research, but the only way I (or anyone else in the class) could produce that many pages that regularly was figuring out the _least_ efficient way to say what we meant.
My writing didn't really start to improve until college when I wrote some research reports for a semi-retired professor who took the time to wean me off my bad habits and write in a scientific style.
Quotas really are everywhere in real life too, but, as you say, they are paired with word limits. Writing to a particular length is an important skill for professional writers. Novels, non-fiction books, short stories, magazine articles, newspaper articles, all have very specific (and fairly narrow) acceptable ranges for word count.
When I made PowerPoint presentations at work, I made it a point to have little-to-no text on the slides: mostly graphics, charts, diagrams, etc. that go along with what I'm saying.
It depends on the job of the PowerPoint. If it's going to be saved and used by some people as a reference later it's usually better to have busy slides that contain the info that needs to be presented and just skip over the unnecessary verbosity by only highlighting key points.
If you're trying to pitch someone on why your redundant project shouldn't be canned then you should probably keep the slides simple and to the point and add in any extra stuff you need in the delivery of the presentation.
If something will be saved and used as a reference, it absolutely should not be a slide deck.
Write a 1-page brief. Make a tabloid-sized poster. Write a blog post. Save your bullet list in a plain text file somewhere. Scribble the main ideas on a chalkboard. Slide decks are the worst possible medium for use outside the context of a presentation (heck, they are a pretty terrible medium even for that context).
I feel like slideshows exist to save the author time at the expense of the participants. Given that presentations always have more viewers than authors, this is rarely the right tradeoff.
Ppt decks in large companies usually aren't really slideshows. They are really meant to be printed / viewed on an individual screen, and is fundamentally enforcing a bullet point style and a lot of visual elements (charts, diagrams) as opposed to a long text only memo.
But over time people feel the need to stuff more things in them and you end up with 40 slides decks that defeat the purpose.
I always got good mileage out of just setting the margins to +.10 whatever the professor's requirement was and increasing line spacing by some tiny amount as well. Also double spacing after periods and occasionally using slightly larger punctuation.
Stupidly inflexible paper length requirements were one of the more annoying aspects of undergrad paper writing.
Paper (or whatever) length requirements (and even voluntarily maintained traditions like when people write many-screens-long articles on Medium or a whole book when the whole valuable idea can be perfectly expressed in a twit or two) is among the things I hate the worst in this world. IMHO shorter (more concise) is better. Writing long papers has always been a huge pain for me and I've always been using dirty hacks like increasing fonts, interline spacing, margins, adding more pictures etc, IMHO inserting more unnecessary text is a much more evil thing to do and papers that are made actually long this way are a pain to read and a time waste.
The point of school papers is to teach students about writing. The point of the length requirements is to make sure the students demonstrate actually spending at least minimal effort on the writing part.
Arguably it would be better if we got rid of grades, had the students devote a large amount of time and effort to making the best paper they could without worrying about length per se, went through multiple editing cycles with each paper, wherein teachers gave detailed constructive feedback in response (even if that feedback was “this paper has a fascinating idea but it would be best stated in 2 pages; the extra 4 pages of analysis are facile and tedious and would best be cut out”).
But devoting serious effort to engaging seriously with every student assignment takes an incredible amount of time and effort for teachers. The best ones spend hours every day outside of class examining/grading student work, and as a result have very little personal time.
Most of the students I knew who “used dirty hacks” frankly just didn’t want to put in the work. Their papers were often thoughtless, with a boring often implausible claim poorly supported by boring evidence/reasoning, held together with confusing writing. They would have benefited a lot from having significantly higher-touch editing/feedback loop, but their teachers didn’t have the bandwidth and their parents didn’t really care. The students only really cared about getting their grade.
How about teaching the students to copyedit? Specifically, teach them to condense arbitrary assigned texts as much as possible to fit into a set maximum word-count while preserving meaning. The lower the word count (with meaning preserved), the more bonus points they get. Make it a competition.
Then, once they have that down, start them on composing their own prose—and then take those student compositions and assign them (each one to the entire class) as new texts to be condensed, again with a competitive spirit of "lowest word-count with meaning preserved, wins."
Then simply take the lowest condensed word-count, and treat it as the score for the original composition. Essentially, the student-as-writer will thus be graded on how much they manage to say. (Which is kind of cool insofar as it's explicitly not grading the student-as-writer on their editing abilities, rather judging the student-as-editor through completely separate work. It encourages the student-as-writer to care about "getting words down on paper" and forget about perfecting their prose in the draft stage—just like a professional writer should!)
(a) I don’t think “lowest word count roughly preserving meaning” is a very good proxy metric for clarity.
(b) I think it would be a great investment to teach students better editing skills. The more students can work on each-other’s work, the more (and faster) feedback they will get, without overburdening a teacher.
Not roughly preserving meaning—entirely preserving meaning. "Amount of meaning preserved" is quantifiable too!
For the non-student-generated texts, create a set of reading-comprehension test questions based on the text. Then, after everyone has written their condensed versions of the text, make five copies of each condensed text and hand it to five students in a separate class (who were assigned a different work to condense), along with the reading-comprehension test. The measure of meaning-preservation is how well they're able to answer the questions about the unabridged work, while referring only to on the other student's distillation of the work.
You can’t rewrite something and “entirely” preserve meaning. The original written document doesn’t even entirely preserve the author’s intended meaning.
But more to the point, being shorter doesn’t inherently lead to better communication. Math papers are extremely short, but are inscrutable to anyone who hasn’t had a decade of intense training. You could make them more accessible to a wider audience by expanding them, even though the expanded bits wouldn’t technically add any “meaning”.
I agree that it’s a useful and somewhat interesting exercise to try to condense writing as much as possible. But this shouldn’t be a primary focus of a writing class, IMO.
The point of condensing is to strip out the fluff to reveal what’s left. What is left is, often, nothing.
Often, students will not understand why they received a bad grade on an English assignment, because they obeyed the letter of the law and wrote the number of words required in service of explaining the topic. They do not realize that, despite all of those words, they have not actually said anything.
When the skeleton of the work is laid bare, with all the trappings stripped away, it becomes much clearer to the student just what exactly the teacher was seeing that led them to give the student a failing grade; and so, as well, it becomes much clearer what the student must do to improve.
I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said before, yes. But I was replying to the GP's argument that "this shouldn't be the primary focus of a writing class." I think it should—as you said, it is the foundation of modern writing instruction ...at the vocational or university level.
But, it certainly isn't the foundation of writing instruction at the public-school "language arts" level. Instead, students are almost-universally taught horrible habits, required to hand in one-shot compositions and reports, never (as part of class) going through the iterative drafting and review process, never being taught to differentiate writing from editing, building in them instead a compulsion toward perfectionism—a "got to get it right the first time" mental paradigm, that I've found to be one of the main causes of procrastination on homework assignments. (I'm a tutor, sometimes; and I also hire content writers for $work.)
I would argue that it'd be easier to make a professional writer out of a person who had never gone through the public schooling system's idea of "writing education" at all. They have less to unlearn.
I went to Catholic school, but I was definitely taught to "omit needless words". I'll go ask if my kids were taught basic style in high school, but I'm guessing the answer is yes.
A teacher saying "omit needless words", and even putting editing marks on the paper to point out what words are needless; and the same teacher converting the paper into one with the needless words omitted, and then grading the paper based on its now-failure to reach the required word-count criteria, are very different lessons. The former just communicates that the student needs to figure out how to edit their work to make it pithier; while the latter communicates that the student needs to use their words to actually say something.
Nowhere in public school is anything like the latter message ever taught.
> Nowhere in public school is anything like the latter message ever taught.
This depends entirely on teachers. I had several excellent middle school and high school English teachers who could judge how well prepared the students were, and didn’t hesitate to absolutely wreck student papers that were obviously just lazy fluff from students who should know better. I had a friend whose paper was returned to him with 3 whole pages in the middle just crossed out, and “what is this nonsense?” written on the side.
Hereby I declare, with great emphasis on the words I am writing at this precise moment, that the idea expressed in your previous comment regarding the possibility of condensing written expression to be more succinct while, at the same time, preserving the meaning inherently given to it in its original incarnation... oh, I reached the quota. Done! :)
TL;DR: I strongly disagree with your first phrase.
This is what GP was hinting at. This technique (well, a subtler approach) is very common among students to reach quotas.
Communication is unfortunately composed of both meaning and fluff (sometimes even only fluff, disguised as meaning under the name of "long-form writing").
Removing the fluff while preserving meaning is a skill, not something to avoid to reach an artificial metric.
And your first paragraph shares a lot of additional information: the writer has nothing in particular to say, and is just pretentiously filling the air as a stalling tactic.
You could condense that down to something like ...
> [... incompetent bloviating elided ...]
... without losing any “meaning” (denotation), because there was none to begin with.
Knowing what a windbag sounds like and knowing how to replicate that impression is a fine writing skill. A fiction author might want to portray a windbag character. A public relations or marketing team might want to whitewash a corrupt company or puff up a useless product. A debater without an argument might want to dump an avalanche of nonsense to distract the audience.
If students write shitty papers which they pad out with pages of fluff not making an argument, the problem is (often) that the students didn’t want to put in the work, not that they didn’t understand the difference. The teacher should feel free to mercilessly put Xs through whole paragraphs, with marginal comments like “this says nothing”.
The thing is, it's adversarial: the more you "punish" your student-as-writer peer (by revealing their text to be bereft of meaning), the higher you score for your editing job.
Which directly contradicts one of the core value schools want to instill today (at least they do where I live, YMMV of course): Being a team player first and foremost.
Would you describe what students do when sparring in martial arts as “not being a team player”?
In any spar, one student will lose; but the point of the spar is for both students to help one-another improve. Sparring usually builds camaraderie, in fact, despite students also striving to win each spar.
> The point of school papers is to teach students about writing. The point of the length requirements is to make sure the students demonstrate actually spending at least minimal effort on the writing part.
Minimum length requirements are useful only for very early instruction (by even lower-division, non-remedial college courses, they are counterproductive, and that's probably true of about the last couple years of high school, too), as a way of nudging students in the direction of complete responses to the prompt. After that, the only length requirements should be maximums, to encourage conciseness (completeness shouldn't need a nudge but that point, and should be addressed in grading the content, not in structural limits.)
After thoroughly reading your post and thinking about it for quite a while I came to realize that you had made an excellent and thoughtful point that should be made known to a broader audience.
I didn't have may writing assignments at university, but most of the ones I did do only had a word limit.
If you could get your idea across in 1 paragraph, then good for you. You probably couldn't, that's not a lot of words, but there was nothing stopping you from submitting a 100 word essay if you really wanted to.
It was encouraged that you wrote the minimum possible to get your point across, rather than trying to pad out your essay with bullshit.
I think that's the way it should be. A word limit stops students from waffling on for too long, which just wastes the time of both the writer and the reader.
I think this is a good a time as any to mention the famous quote by Mark Twain: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead".
People don't spend enough time thinking about what they want to say, and instead just write.
I’m in field where technological illiteracy runs amok. I submitted a paper with Times proper, not Times New Roman, and was under suspicion that I was manipulating the font to achieve a page goal.
My kids have had to follow formatting requirements that specify "pages" and "margins" for documents that will never be printed. Ironically, these come from an organization called "Modern Language Association."
The Modern Language Association (http://www.mla.org) is the main scholarly society for the study of literature in modern languages (including English) in North America. "MLA Style" is one of several styles used in scholarly publishing in the humanities, and its citation format is often taught in schools.
Old editions of the manual did talk about margins and pages; newer editions make far fewer assumptions about your medium (though it assumes you are going to be often -- though not exclusively -- citing physical books and media in your work).
It's been years since a publisher gave me a "page count" in their guidelines; word count is nearly universal. I stopped assigning page counts to students around the time that the publishers stopped (a long time ago at this point), and I think most of my colleagues did the same. So I'm not sure what kerning and em-size wizardry really does for you, unless your professor is pretty old school (and hasn't bought a new edition of the MLA Handbook since the Clinton administration).
Yes, for now. I don't think essay-reading software is up to speed. ;-)
My preference would be for my reader to display every document in my own preferred format. This would be the case if essays were submitted in plain text format, for instance. In that case, the only formatting requirement would be something to delimit paragraphs.
That was the dream of the original HTML. It wasn't supposed to be a graphics rendering language. Your browser was supposed to format a document according to your preferences, or even read it to you if you're blind.
What's really happened is that teachers have dropped paper-based format requirements such as inches of margin, as they get more comfortable with computers. Today, my kids use Google Docs almost exclusively.
So maybe students should be required to submit their essays in Markdown, with some restrictions on formatting so they don't go crazy with bulleted lists and so on.
Then ideally, you'd accept plaintext submissions, and have your reading/marking software format them in whichever way you want for optimal viewing (possibly depending on your taste, device, time of day, phase of moon, etc).
That's why math journals require LaTeX - that takes the formatting steps like margins, fonts, etc. out of the writer's hands.
Times New Roman is the font
That all my college teachers want
But Courier New will have to do
It adds a page, or sometimes two
Hooray for fixed-width fonts!
The hinting of Times Newer Roman is completely different, a lot fuzzier, and leads to inconsistent letter heights. On Linux (with TTF bytecode enabled) I can easily see the difference at their sample "side-by-side comparison". Maybe not on Mac.
Additionally the x-height of Newer feels larger. Upon reading the page, I learned: "The x–height (2) of all lowercase letters has been increased by about 5% so that they sit wider at the same point size."
Times Newer Roman is basically the same thing as STIX Two Text.
> I haven't had an assignment printed and marked up in over 10 years.
That’s unfortunate. In my experience editing/commentary done on a paper copy is of noticeably higher quality (both when I am reading someone else’s work, and soliciting feedback). It’s not entirely clear why... maybe paper and pen puts the reader in the right frame of mind?
TurnItIn is about plagiarism. Grammarly is about writing well. TurnItIn won't tell you your using the wrong you're in yore sentence about the days of yaw.
I hope you appreciate how badly I've affected my Grammarly stats with this example. Actually, Grammarly missed all the wrong words. I might uninstall it.
The bigger x-height seems to make it a bit more readable. However, generally professors allow Palatino instead of Times even when measuring length requirement by page; unmodified Palatino is also wider but more aesthetically pleasing, and is widely used in academic papers.
I do: Times New Roman was designed for a newspaper — Brittain’s “The Times” — which means it was designed in large part to keep the cost of paper and ink down. Compared to book fonts of the time, Times New Roman has uncommonly narrow letterforms and short descenders to allow for more text on a line and more lines in a column.
If you care more about aesthetics than about ink and paper cost, you should never use Times New Roman.
I second the recommendations for Garamond and Palatino.
We never had any page or word requirements in school. If anything we were told things like no longer than 20 pages. Everything we wrote about had a point and it was hard sometimes to keep things concise. Our technical writing program was pretty awesome. The main point that was always hammered in was conciseness. Keep everything concise and to the point. Don't write a paragraph to say something you can say in a sentence.
A lot of things my classmates and I wrote would come back telling us to make it more concise. So many editing sessions were spent just cutting things out.
We were trained to write technical reports and journal articles. After a few years of that, I find a lot of journal articles I read to be fairly poorly written, in regards to just getting to the point of things. I really appreciate the technical writing classes I got in school.
It's funny, the people who struggled the most to figure it out were people taking the program who already had degrees and were used to things like word and page counts and needing to fill in space with fancy wording and fluff.
> ... needing to fill in space with fancy wording and fluff.
I doubt there is any academic program at all where you need to do that. There are however tons where you are allowed to do it, and students will opt to do it because that's easier than coming up with something interesting to say.
If the entire document is in the same typeface then it doesn't matter what typeface the writer uses because the reader can simply substitute their own favourite.
In fact why should an essay even specify the font? All that should be necessary is plain text. The reader can then read it in an application that uses a specific typeface and reflows the text to fit the margins, even Windows Notepad can do that. A slightly more sophisticated application could also double space as necessary.
I'm glad I didn't have any of this crap while I was at school and uni. My final year experimental report (electron spin resonance, 1977) was about a 100 pages of single spaced typewritten text, hand drawn charts, and figures. I suspect that it only a little more time to produce on our portable typewriter than it would now in a word processor because we were not distracted by irrelevancies.
The goal behind "page count" as a metric is to give you an idea of how much depth you should be going into on whatever topic you're writing about.
If you're supposed to produce a twenty page paper and you've got 13 pages, you need more meat in the paper to fulfill expectations. Alternatively, if you're supposed to produce a three page summary and you've got seven pages, you're getting caught in the weeds somewhere and need to take a step back.
It's a bit easier to, at the start of the paper, make a judgement about what's expected in terms of depth when you're given a page count instead of a word count, because you know roughly how much information can fit on a page but perhaps not how many words that takes up.
I understand why teachers have these minimums, they don't want the kids to half-ass it, but I feel that this is an annoying consequence. Instead of writing something that reads nicely, I'll end up breaking up single words into phrases in order to get closer to the minimum.
I'm not sure of a good solution to this problem, so I suppose I will have to live with it.
When faced with spacious word limits during my freelance writing gigs I often go off on a wild tangent to fill in the quota. This one time I was asked to write about diabetes and found myself mentioning Okinawa centegenerians, soy cooking oil and forced swimming tests done on rats. It turned out interesting in the end.
In Denmark you have to supply word count or character count.
I mean, I guess you could say that a normal page is equal to x words or characters, stuff your pages with wide margins and wide kerning and claim your word count is x*pages+small_random_number ...
Reading the comments here, am I the only one who had the problem of writing too much and trying to figure out how to fit within the required page limits? :P Still trying to figure out how to not be so verbose. :(
In most essay or reports I've written the requirement was given in number of pages, but always with the definition of a page being 2400 characters (I don't remember wether that was with or without spaces).
This is fascinating to me. What a nice hack. I always enjoy it when people find clever ways to undermine existing systems. I'll be installing this font shortly!
