
How to Say Nothing in 500 Words - imgabe
http://www3.baylor.edu/~Jesse_Airaudi/nothingwords.html
======
snprbob86
I 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
_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._

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
The 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
_No 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.

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ojbyrne
It 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.

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jrockway
I'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. ;)

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hugh
Amateur stuff. Learn how to say nothing in 70,000 words, and you've got
yourself a PhD.

~~~
rms
Yeah, 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.

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coglethorpe
In my opinion, the writing style used to pad papers about college football are
used by a majority of bloggers. That is my opinion.

~~~
derefr
You'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
conciseizr.com -- new YCombinator winter entry. :-)

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ghshephard
I just love it that the baylor.edu webserver is Netscape-Enterprise 4.1. Don't
mess with a classic.

~~~
ghshephard
Tragically, 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

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swombat
Touché.

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sdpurtill
The yellow background on that site makes my eyes burn.

