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How to Say Nothing in 500 Words
- coglethorpe 18y agoIn my opinion, the writing style used to pad papers about college football are used by a majority of bloggers. That is my opinion.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- derefr 18y agoYou'd think these fluffy participles could be picked out (or just removed) by a program similar to a grammar checker. I might pay good money for such a "concise-izer."
- coglethorpe 18y agoconciseizr.com -- new YCombinator winter entry. :-)
- swombat 18y agoTouché.
- snprbob86 18y agoI HATE padded text. Length constraints kill the quality of many student, academic, and professional writings. In the last 10 years of my education, I routinely submitted works less than 80% of the required length and still received A grades. Most instructors are reasonable enough to know that high quality work does not need to meet arbitrary constraints. I wish educators would stop providing length constraints, even when students request them. Unnecessary verbosity should be punished, not rewarded. Succinct, precise, unambiguous, and accurate writing needs to be encouraged.
- dfranke 18y agoI routinely submitted works less than 80% of the required length and still received A grades. Most instructors are reasonable enough to know that high quality work does not need to meet arbitrary constraints. That works great in cases where the instructors are allowed to think for themselves, not so well otherwise. In Florida we had this law called the Gordon Rule which states that all students are required to write 24,000 words worth of essay text over the course of their college education. They don't literally track how many words students write on an individual basis, but rather designate certain courses as 2,000, 4,000, or 6,000 word courses. Professors are then held strictly accountable for truth-in-advertising. They're required to check every student's word-count, and to flunk any student who goes one word under the quota.
- arockwell 18y agoThe Gordon rule is not nearly that restrictive. Gordon rule courses re structured so that students will have a lot of writing assignments. No one is getting flunked for writing 5,999 words. The idea is to force students to take courses that require a lot of writing. The rule is actually not a terrible idea in the first place. Its basically a response to a larger than you'd expect number of florida university graduates not being able to pass the CLAST (a re-hashing of the SAT). There's a similar requirement that all students must take a certain number of math classses.
- dfranke 18y agoNo one is getting flunked for writing 5,999 words. I graduated from the University of Florida. YMMV, but my instructors in Gordon Rule courses were quite diligent/paranoid about making sure students met the word quota. I never heard of a student actually getting flunked for being slightly under, but that's because the instructors made sure that they didn't turn in an under-quota paper in the first place -- even if it meant just padding the extra space with repetition of "Gordon Rule sucks." (Ok, so you couldn't be quite that blatant, but not far off) Edit: UF was in the middle of a reaccreditation audit while I was there. Maybe the situation is less bad the rest of the time.
- 18y ago
- sdpurtill 18y agoThe yellow background on that site makes my eyes burn.
- hugh 18y agoAmateur stuff. Learn how to say nothing in 70,000 words, and you've got yourself a PhD.
- rms 18y agoYeah, really, I can do 500 words in 15 minutes with 4 internet citations and a book. Any topic... You don't make it as far in college while doing as little work as I have if you write for meaning. Except my tour de force Persecution of Atheists in America paper (10 pages); that's the only thing good thing I've written in college.
- narag 18y ago>Learn how to say nothing in 70,000 words, and you've got yourself a PhD. Easy if you're a pothead PhD.
- xiaoma 18y agoMaybe if you're a humanities major.
- ghshephard 18y agoI just love it that the baylor.edu webserver is Netscape-Enterprise 4.1. Don't mess with a classic.
- ghshephard 18y agoTragically, the dark side appears to be now dominating... [root@jira ~]# telnet www.baylor.edu 80 Trying 129.62.15.253... Connected to www.baylor.edu (129.62.15.253). Escape character is '^]'. GET /index.htm HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Date: Sat, 02 May 2009 09:05:09 GMT Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
- ojbyrne 18y agoIt seems like people are missing the point. "But if you aim higher, you must work differently. Instead of stuffing your sentences with straw, you must try steadily to get rid of the padding, to make your sentences lean and tough. If you are really working at it, your first draft will greatly exceed the required total, and then you will work it down." Then the 500 words becomes a constraint rather than a goal, and constraints make for great writing. And that's how the limits were originally intended.
- jrockway 18y agoI'm not sure how I feel about this. Nobody really cares about the subjects of English 101 essays. On the one hand, if you're a good writer, you can write 500 words about anything; even if you don't care about it. On the other hand, anyone can write something good if they do care about it. So I'm wondering why college courses assign assignments that nobody wants to do. Do they want people to become good writers by writing about irrelevant subjects? Sounds like a great way to make sure people never get good at writing. (I was always bad at writing in school. Now I get a significant income from having written a book. Not sure what this says about anything, but if I ever meet my high school/college English teachers, I will mention it to them. ;)