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"Your essay must be at least X words" has always been an impediment to truly good writing skills, but now it's just worthless.
by jerf 2y ago
"Your essay must be at least X words" has always been an impediment to truly good writing skills, but now it's just worthless.
- portaouflop 2y agoI never had that requirement outside the first years of school- where it’s more about writing practice than writing actual essays. After it was always “must be below X pages”
- bluGill 2y agoX words is supposed to be a proxy for do enough research that you have something to say with depth. A history of the world in 15 minutes better cover enough ground to be worth 15 minutes - as opposed to 1 minute and then filler words. Of course filler is something everyone who writes such a thing and comes up a few words short does - but you are supposed to go find something more to say.
- desdenova 2y agoWhen I was a lazy kid, and there was a requirement to fill a number of lines/pages, I'd just write with bigger letters.
- QuadmasterXLII 2y agoI eventually flipped from moaning about word count minimums to whining about conference page limits but it took a long, long time- well into grad school. The change came when I finally had something to say.
- eszed 2y agoThe way I explained it when I taught English 101 to first-year university students: any substantive question can generate an answer of a paragraph or a life's work; in this assignment I expect you to go into this much depth. Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbitrary word-count. Giving a word-count to an AI seems (currently) to activate the same behavior. I've not yet seen an AI text that's better writing than a college freshman could be expected to produce.
- xivzgrev 2y agoWish my high school English teachers had taught that. I remember fluffing essays to get to a minimum College admissions essays on the other hand had the opposite problem - answering a big question in 500 words. Each sentence needed to pack a punch.
- eszed 2y agoDon't get me started on college admissions essays. Rich kids pay other people to write them. Poor kids don't understand the class-markers they're expected to include. If AI consigns them to the dustbin of history it might be the first unalloyed good that tech ever does.
- eszed 2y agoClarification: "that tech" meaning the direct antecedent: "[AI] tech", not tech in general. I'm a Humanities guy, not an idiot. :-)
- iambateman 2y ago> Of course, good expository writing is as to-the-point as possible, so the first hurdle for most students was eliminating the juvenile trick of padding out their prose with waffle to meet an arbitrary word-count. This is the most beautiful sentence I’ve read today.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoProblem is, I doubt many people overcome this hurdle - that "juvenile trick" is pretty much the defining quality of articles and books we consume.
- eszed 2y agoIndeed. We need better English teachers. :-) We won't get them unless we appreciate both teaching and the Humanities more than we do. I was good, but by no means the best (75th percentile, maybe?). I loved doing it, but changed careers to IT because I'd never have been able to support a family on what I was paid. A culture which pays teachers poorly, treats them with disrespect ("those who can do..."), and relentlessly emphasizes STEM, STEM, STEM is one that's slowly killing itself, no matter how much shiny tech at inflated valuations it turns out.
- ANewFormation 2y agoOne of my favorite Mark Twain quotes comes from one of his correspondences: 'My apologies for such a long letter, I hadn't the time to write a short one.'
- Loranubi 2y agoProbably not by Twain, but still a good quote. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/