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Students often don't take into account that they have to lay out and phrase their points in such a way that they actually convey them to the reader. They forget supporting facts, context, counter arguments, and other aspects that are essential for a proper academic essay.
As a Dual Enrollment teacher, I had to give students a word count. Otherwise, I got arguments that lacked sufficient supporting details. They quickly learn that improving your word count is not simply adding a word here or there, but adding ideas and support.
However, I gave it as a range. And I took off points as a range. That is, an essay had to be 750 words. But no points were subtracted until 699. That avoided words added just to add words to the count.
Students often don't take into account that they have to lay out and phrase their points in such a way that they actually convey them to the reader. They forget supporting facts, context, counter arguments, and other aspects that are essential for a proper academic essay.
I tend to agree with this.
I had never really thought about this until now, but I think that a really good writing teacher might consider dual assignments: same topic, one concise, the other of a certain length. The reason I say that is that there were a number of times I had to write reports, and I was given specific number of pages the report was to be within, including the minimum.
It's not unlike Wikipedia. Most articles start off with a nice concise section and then go into more detail for the remainder of the article.
As a Dual Enrollment teacher, I had to give students a word count. Otherwise, I got arguments that lacked sufficient supporting details. They quickly learn that improving your word count is not simply adding a word here or there, but adding ideas and support.
However, I gave it as a range. And I took off points as a range. That is, an essay had to be 750 words. But no points were subtracted until 699. That avoided words added just to add words to the count.
Yeah, we have that issue at my job (which is a writing job). Usually in my office people are quite thorough because the people we having reviewing it are *very* picky. However, we have offices that are exclusively set up to help other offices and sometimes we will get stuff that has basically a paragraph or two summarizing and analyzing 2000 pages of content. That simply is not enough to provide sufficient support or analysis. We do have people on the other side of the spectrum who go on and on without the ability to summarize, but that is less of a problem than the opposite.
In grade school you struggle to fill the pages. In graduate school you learn to make a quick transition to communicating a lot of information in a limited number of pages. Some of my best profs placed hard limits on the number of pages you could hand in. Here, there is much more emphasis on content, and your grade reflects this. No prose or bombast wanted. Either you submit an assignment that substantively reflects the question or topic in the limited length given, or you get a lousy grade. I think grade schools would benefit their students by focusing more time on differentiating between the various writing styles than simple expository writing. Even college needs more work on writing. For example, liberal arts majors seem to develop writing that is more in the prose style. Their writing tends to be better quality but they often can't be succinct. STEM people focus more on their technical field and less on writing but their writing is more succinct. But many in both areas tend to need to reinvent their writing in some way when they hit the real world, if they wish to be well-rounded and successful.
Well, there are many different ways to format a writing assignment.
I once read this:
If you want your boss to make a decision, give him a one paragraph memo.
If you want to inform your boss, give him a one page report.
If you want to **** your boss off, give him a 10 page report with the conclusion and recommendations on the last page.
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