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.
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.