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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 a

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.
    - jacobolus 8y ago
      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.
      - derefr 8y ago
        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.
dragonwriter 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. 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.)
Jyaif 8y ago
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.

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.
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    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.
    - derefr 8y ago
      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.

dragonwriter 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. 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.)

Jyaif 8y ago

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.