People are so obsessed with length.
When I give somebody a writing assignment, the first question is always "how long does it have to be?" If I tell somebody I wrote a book, "How many pages is it?" You'd think they care more about the feat of finishing the writing more than what was actually written.
I know this is a bad habit brought on by academia, where length can be just as important as content. Still, it bothers me. Aside from the fact that it belittles the important of content, I am greatly bothered because there are no useful measurements.
I wrote a story overview that was 16 pages long. This was single-spaced with indented paragraphs. When I made it double-spaced for legibility, it was 32 pages. It was the same document, all the same words and everything, but to say that I used 32 pages just to give an overview of a story sounds way more impressive than 16. Similarly, I wrote a book that is 25 pages long. It also has an average of 22 words per page. The standard page has 250 words on it, making my 25-page book seem even less impressive.
Page length is a bad measure, but word count seems promising, right? I keep measuring pages in terms of words, after all. There are two main problems with measuring a work in number of words. The first is that words come in a variety of length. The other is that words can have vast differences in descriptive meaning. Every time I describe something as "immaculate" instead of "clean", I am writing more, but being counted the same. However, if I use "immaculate" of "really really clean", then I am using fewer words, but using much stronger and vivid ones.
Try all of the measures available. Characters, words, sentences, pages, chapters. No matter what you choose, you will find that it can be very misleading. I will say, though, that if you use all of them simultaneously, you can get a decent idea of the composition of a piece of writing.
However, I must reiterate my original belief that length itself is a stupid thing to measure. It is the meaning of what you say, the effectiveness of its rhetoric that matters far more than anything else. If you can make an interesting point or describe a fascinating concept in ten sentences, do it and don't waste your time trying to expand it into twenty pages.
If you want to know how long a piece of writing should be, here is the best advice possible: Write it until it's done.
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Academia has word requirements for assignments because they want their students to actually do SOME work.
ReplyDeleteIf I have a research paper, and you need 1,000 words, I am not going to go as in depth as I would if you needed 2,000 words, or even 3,000. I can hardly blame academia for it. Students are lazy. The fact that so many end up dropping out, or don't have 3.8 GPAs (much less 3.0s) should be enough emperical evidence to support this claim.
Of course, if you need 2,000 words, I might just end up getting creative, rather than actually working. I distinctly remember creatng a whole paragraph out of something I could have said in two sentences, and if the teacher is either too stupid or neurotic to notice this level of bullshit, I'm going to keep it up.
My experience with English classes have pretty much been:
Week 1: Omg this is so awesome. We'll all get to play intellectual.
Week 4: shit. Now I have to do some work. But I have all this other shit to do too. And no one is playing intellectual except for two people. This blows.
Week 6: I'm vaguely mocking the class by making morbid jokes.
Week final: I'm pretty much just a cynical bastard and somehow I squeaked by without getting anything out of the class.
Of course, my uni's english program kind of sucks. Out of the three I had up there, only one was cool. He (i kid you not), stated that he wasn't high on the first day of class. My second teacher was some sort of feminist or something, and the third one was just batshit crazy (luckily I got an A in her class).
Of course, it's more of a school for science anyway.
My High School's english program was a lot better. The contemporary literature class was actually a philosophy class.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-smigelski/why-cant-tiffany-write_b_590191.html
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