How to Say Nothing in 500 Words
www3.baylor.edu
www3.baylor.edu
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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. ;)
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.
Easy if you're a pothead PhD.
[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