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.
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.