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”.
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.