7 ms·

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 we

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.

qwerty456127 8y ago
> Stupidly inflexible paper length requirements 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.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  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.
  - derefr 8y ago
    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!)
    - jacobolus 8y ago
      (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.
      - derefr 8y ago
        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.
- lokedhs 8y ago
  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.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    Not Mark Twain, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
- toomanybeersies 8y ago
  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.
xattt 8y ago
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.

qwerty456127 8y ago

> Stupidly inflexible paper length requirements 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.

jacobolus 8y ago
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.
- derefr 8y ago
  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!)
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    (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.
    - derefr 8y ago
      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.
lokedhs 8y ago
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.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  Not Mark Twain, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
toomanybeersies 8y ago
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.

xattt 8y ago

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.