
Times Newer Roman, a sneaky font designed to make essays look longer - Tomte
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/18/17875054/times-newer-roman-font-essay-length
======
mrob
Word count quotas are one of the worst ideas in education. In real life,
quotas are practically non-existent and word limits are everywhere. Teaching
students to pad their writing to fill a quota is teaching them bad writing. I
suspect this is the reason so much academic writing is bad.

~~~
cm2187
In fact we were told recently at my company to keep every ppt deck under 4
pages if we can. No one has the time to read long presentations.

~~~
MiddleEndian
When I made PowerPoint presentations at work, I made it a point to have
little-to-no text on the slides: mostly graphics, charts, diagrams, etc. that
go along with what I'm saying.

It's no fun to exhaust my audience.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
It depends on the job of the PowerPoint. If it's going to be saved and used by
some people as a reference later it's usually better to have busy slides that
contain the info that needs to be presented and just skip over the unnecessary
verbosity by only highlighting key points.

If you're trying to pitch someone on why your redundant project shouldn't be
canned then you should probably keep the slides simple and to the point and
add in any extra stuff you need in the delivery of the presentation.

~~~
jacobolus
If something will be saved and used as a reference, it absolutely should not
be a slide deck.

Write a 1-page brief. Make a tabloid-sized poster. Write a blog post. Save
your bullet list in a plain text file somewhere. Scribble the main ideas on a
chalkboard. Slide decks are the worst possible medium for use outside the
context of a presentation (heck, they are a pretty terrible medium even for
that context).

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meddlepal
I always got good mileage out of just setting the margins to +.10 whatever the
professor's requirement was and increasing line spacing by some tiny amount as
well. Also double spacing after periods and occasionally using slightly larger
punctuation.

Stupidly inflexible paper length requirements were one of the more annoying
aspects of undergrad paper writing.

~~~
qwerty456127
> Stupidly inflexible paper length requirements

Paper (or whatever) length requirements (and even voluntarily maintained
traditions like when people write many-screens-long articles on Medium or a
whole book when the whole valuable idea can be perfectly expressed in a twit
or two) is among the things I hate the worst in this world. IMHO shorter (more
concise) is better. Writing long papers has always been a huge pain for me and
I've always been using dirty hacks like increasing fonts, interline spacing,
margins, adding more pictures etc, IMHO inserting more unnecessary text is a
much more evil thing to do and papers that are made actually long this way are
a pain to read and a time waste.

~~~
jacobolus
The point of school papers is to teach students about writing. The point of
the length requirements is to make sure the students demonstrate actually
spending at least minimal effort on the writing part.

Arguably it would be better if we got rid of grades, had the students devote a
large amount of time and effort to making the best paper they could without
worrying about length per se, went through multiple editing cycles with each
paper, wherein teachers gave detailed constructive feedback in response (even
if that feedback was “this paper has a fascinating idea but it would be best
stated in 2 pages; the extra 4 pages of analysis are facile and tedious and
would best be cut out”).

But devoting serious effort to engaging seriously with every student
assignment takes an incredible amount of time and effort for teachers. The
best ones spend hours every day outside of class examining/grading student
work, and as a result have very little personal time.

Most of the students I knew who “used dirty hacks” frankly just didn’t want to
put in the work. Their papers were often thoughtless, with a boring often
implausible claim poorly supported by boring evidence/reasoning, held together
with confusing writing. They would have benefited a lot from having
significantly higher-touch editing/feedback loop, but their teachers didn’t
have the bandwidth and their parents didn’t really care. The students only
really cared about getting their grade.

~~~
derefr
How about teaching the _students_ to copyedit? Specifically, teach them to
condense arbitrary assigned texts as much as possible to fit into a set
_maximum_ word-count while preserving meaning. The lower the word count (with
meaning preserved), the more bonus points they get. Make it a competition.

Then, once they have _that_ down, start them on composing their own prose—and
then take those student compositions and assign them (each one to the _entire_
class) as new texts to be condensed, again with a competitive spirit of
"lowest word-count with meaning preserved, wins."

Then simply take the lowest condensed word-count, and treat it as the score
for the original composition. Essentially, the student-as-writer will thus be
graded on _how much they manage to say_. (Which is kind of cool insofar as
it's explicitly _not_ grading the student-as-writer on their editing
abilities, rather judging the student-as-editor through completely separate
work. It encourages the student-as-writer to care about "getting words down on
paper" and forget about perfecting their prose in the draft stage—just like a
professional writer should!)

~~~
jacobolus
(a) I don’t think “lowest word count roughly preserving meaning” is a very
good proxy metric for clarity.

(b) I think it would be a great investment to teach students better editing
skills. The more students can work on each-other’s work, the more (and faster)
feedback they will get, without overburdening a teacher.

~~~
derefr
Not _roughly_ preserving meaning—entirely preserving meaning. "Amount of
meaning preserved" is quantifiable too!

For the non-student-generated texts, create a set of reading-comprehension
test questions based on the text. Then, after everyone has written their
condensed versions of the text, make five copies of each condensed text and
hand it to five students in a separate class (who were assigned a different
work to condense), along with the reading-comprehension test. The measure of
meaning-preservation is how well they're able to answer the questions about
the unabridged work, while referring only to on the other student's
distillation of the work.

~~~
jacobolus
You can’t rewrite something and “entirely” preserve meaning. The original
written document doesn’t even entirely preserve the author’s intended meaning.

But more to the point, being shorter doesn’t inherently lead to better
communication. Math papers are extremely short, but are inscrutable to anyone
who hasn’t had a decade of intense training. You could make them more
accessible to a wider audience by expanding them, even though the expanded
bits wouldn’t technically add any “meaning”.

I agree that it’s a useful and somewhat interesting exercise to try to
condense writing as much as possible. But this shouldn’t be a primary focus of
a writing class, IMO.

~~~
derefr
The point of condensing is to strip out the fluff to reveal what’s left. What
is left is, often, nothing.

Often, students will not understand why they received a bad grade on an
English assignment, because they obeyed the letter of the law and wrote the
number of words required in service of explaining the topic. They do not
realize that, despite all of those words, they have not actually said
anything.

When the skeleton of the work is laid bare, with all the trappings stripped
away, it becomes much clearer to the student just what exactly the teacher was
seeing that led them to give the student a failing grade; and so, as well, it
becomes much clearer what the student must do to improve.

~~~
tptacek
You're writing as if this wasn't basically the foundation of modern writing
instruction, or literally the most memorable quote from Elements of Style.

~~~
derefr
I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said before, yes. But I was replying
to the GP's argument that "this shouldn't be the primary focus of a writing
class." I think it should—as you said, it _is_ the foundation of modern
writing instruction ...at the vocational or university level.

But, it certainly _isn 't_ the foundation of writing instruction at the
public-school "language arts" level. Instead, students are almost-universally
taught horrible habits, required to hand in one-shot compositions and reports,
never (as part of class) going through the iterative drafting and review
process, never being taught to differentiate writing from editing, building in
them instead a compulsion toward perfectionism—a "got to get it right the
first time" mental paradigm, that I've found to be one of the main causes of
procrastination on homework assignments. (I'm a tutor, sometimes; and I also
hire content writers for $work.)

I would argue that it'd be easier to make a professional writer out of a
person who had never gone through the public schooling system's idea of
"writing education" at all. They have less to unlearn.

~~~
tptacek
I went to Catholic school, but I was definitely taught to "omit needless
words". I'll go ask if my kids were taught basic style in high school, but I'm
guessing the answer is yes.

~~~
derefr
A teacher saying "omit needless words", and even putting editing marks on the
paper to point out what words are needless; and the same teacher converting
the paper into one with the needless words omitted, and then grading the paper
based on its now-failure to reach the required word-count criteria, are very
different lessons. The former just communicates that the student needs to
figure out how to edit their work to make it pithier; while the latter
communicates that the student needs to use their words to _actually say
something_.

Nowhere in public school is anything like the latter message ever taught.

~~~
jacobolus
> _Nowhere in public school is anything like the latter message ever taught._

This depends entirely on teachers. I had several excellent middle school and
high school English teachers who could judge how well prepared the students
were, and didn’t hesitate to absolutely wreck student papers that were
obviously just lazy fluff from students who should know better. I had a friend
whose paper was returned to him with 3 whole pages in the middle just crossed
out, and “what is this nonsense?” written on the side.

~~~
tptacek
Same. I picked up "avoid passive voice" from high school English teachers.

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analog31
My kids have had to follow formatting requirements that specify "pages" and
"margins" for documents that will never be printed. Ironically, these come
from an organization called "Modern Language Association."

~~~
bobthecowboy
They're still going to be read, right? If I was going to read 20-30 essays I'd
want them to be identical format.

~~~
analog31
Yes, for now. I don't think essay-reading software is up to speed. ;-)

My preference would be for my reader to display every document in my own
preferred format. This would be the case if essays were submitted in plain
text format, for instance. In that case, the only formatting requirement would
be something to delimit paragraphs.

That was the dream of the original HTML. It wasn't supposed to be a graphics
rendering language. Your browser was supposed to format a document according
to your preferences, or even read it to you if you're blind.

What's really happened is that teachers have dropped paper-based format
requirements such as inches of margin, as they get more comfortable with
computers. Today, my kids use Google Docs almost exclusively.

~~~
mwcampbell
So maybe students should be required to submit their essays in Markdown, with
some restrictions on formatting so they don't go crazy with bulleted lists and
so on.

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jdawe

      Times New Roman is the font
      That all my college teachers want
      But Courier New will have to do
      It adds a page, or sometimes two
      Hooray for fixed-width fonts!

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jimbo1qaz
The hinting of Times Newer Roman is completely different, a lot fuzzier, and
leads to inconsistent letter heights. On Linux (with TTF bytecode enabled) I
can easily see the difference at their sample "side-by-side comparison". Maybe
not on Mac.

Additionally the x-height of Newer feels larger. Upon reading the page, I
learned: "The x–height (2) of all lowercase letters has been increased by
about 5% so that they sit wider at the same point size."

Times Newer Roman is basically the same thing as STIX Two Text.

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zwayhowder
My uni uses TurnitIn to scan all assignments; it provides a report with the
word count in it to the grader.

My pet peeve is we still have to use double-spaced lines even though I haven't
had an assignment printed and marked up in over 10 years.

~~~
jacobolus
> _I haven 't had an assignment printed and marked up in over 10 years._

That’s unfortunate. In my experience editing/commentary done on a paper copy
is of noticeably higher quality (both when I am reading someone else’s work,
and soliciting feedback). It’s not entirely clear why... maybe paper and pen
puts the reader in the right frame of mind?

~~~
zwayhowder
This is true. I've had a number of digital comments over the years that start:

    
    
      Zwayhowder,
    

And end because enter submits the comment not starting a new line :/

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deanmen
The bigger x-height seems to make it a bit more readable. However, generally
professors allow Palatino instead of Times even when measuring length
requirement by page; unmodified Palatino is also wider but more aesthetically
pleasing, and is widely used in academic papers.

~~~
ahartmetz
Yay for Palatino. Garamond and similar fonts are nice, too.

Times New Roman and Computer Modern should not be used by anyone. I don't have
a "rational" argument, but just look at them, they're ugly.

~~~
wyoung2
> I don't have a "rational" argument

I do: Times New Roman was designed for a newspaper — Brittain’s “The Times” —
which means it was designed in large part to keep the cost of paper and ink
down. Compared to book fonts of the time, Times New Roman has uncommonly
narrow letterforms and short descenders to allow for more text on a line and
more lines in a column.

If you care more about aesthetics than about ink and paper cost, you should
never use Times New Roman.

I second the recommendations for Garamond and Palatino.

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crazygringo
I assume this is identical to using Word:

Format > Font > Advanced > Scale: 105%, Spacing: Expanded: 0.5 pt

Making a font for it is a nice marketing ploy, but not sure there's anything
new here...

~~~
saurik
The vertical height and spacing of this font is the same as the original.

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grawprog
We never had any page or word requirements in school. If anything we were told
things like no longer than 20 pages. Everything we wrote about had a point and
it was hard sometimes to keep things concise. Our technical writing program
was pretty awesome. The main point that was always hammered in was
conciseness. Keep everything concise and to the point. Don't write a paragraph
to say something you can say in a sentence.

A lot of things my classmates and I wrote would come back telling us to make
it more concise. So many editing sessions were spent just cutting things out.

We were trained to write technical reports and journal articles. After a few
years of that, I find a lot of journal articles I read to be fairly poorly
written, in regards to just getting to the point of things. I really
appreciate the technical writing classes I got in school.

It's funny, the people who struggled the most to figure it out were people
taking the program who already had degrees and were used to things like word
and page counts and needing to fill in space with fancy wording and fluff.

~~~
omaranto
> ... needing to fill in space with fancy wording and fluff.

I doubt there is any academic program at all where you _need_ to do that.
There are however tons where you are _allowed_ to do it, and students will
_opt_ to do it because that's easier than coming up with something interesting
to say.

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kwhitefoot
If the entire document is in the same typeface then it doesn't matter what
typeface the writer uses because the reader can simply substitute their own
favourite.

In fact why should an essay even specify the font? All that should be
necessary is plain text. The reader can then read it in an application that
uses a specific typeface and reflows the text to fit the margins, even Windows
Notepad can do that. A slightly more sophisticated application could also
double space as necessary.

I'm glad I didn't have any of this crap while I was at school and uni. My
final year experimental report (electron spin resonance, 1977) was about a 100
pages of single spaced typewritten text, hand drawn charts, and figures. I
suspect that it only a little more time to produce on our portable typewriter
than it would now in a word processor because we were not distracted by
irrelevancies.

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loeber
I was always confused by page requirements, which could be trivially gamed. I
always thought that word-count requirements were a much better metric.

~~~
CocaKoala
The goal behind "page count" as a metric is to give you an idea of how much
depth you should be going into on whatever topic you're writing about.

If you're supposed to produce a twenty page paper and you've got 13 pages, you
need more meat in the paper to fulfill expectations. Alternatively, if you're
supposed to produce a three page summary and you've got seven pages, you're
getting caught in the weeds somewhere and need to take a step back.

It's a bit easier to, at the start of the paper, make a judgement about what's
expected in terms of depth when you're given a page count instead of a word
count, because you know roughly how much information can fit on a page but
perhaps not how many words that takes up.

~~~
loeber
By the time you're in college/graduate school, surely you have a rough
understanding of how much "content" fits into 800 words?

(As compared to 1500 or 4000 words.)

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tsumnia
As someone writing journal articles, can I have one that's the opposite and
makes my essays look smaller? XD

~~~
cscheid
The amount of class-file hackery that goes on with LaTeX submissions is
remarkable. (shoutout to the rest of HN procrastinating near the CHI deadline)

~~~
a_e_k
I don't want to think about how many \vspace{-0.05in} I've sprinkled into
manuscripts over the years.

~~~
cscheid
Hey Andrew, funny seeing you here (we went to grad school together!)

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pg_bot
I hated page length requirements in school.

Dragging a paper to five pages when you can make the point in three is a waste
for everyone.

Focus your writing and everyone will be better off.

------
tomc1985
Page length requirements seem so silly. Word count requirements are much
harder to get around, at least not without a thesaurus--

Advanced elocution for the maximization of the fulfillment of arbitrary length
requirements...

~~~
tombert
I understand why teachers have these minimums, they don't want the kids to
half-ass it, but I feel that this is an annoying consequence. Instead of
writing something that reads nicely, I'll end up breaking up single words into
phrases in order to get closer to the minimum.

I'm not sure of a good solution to this problem, so I suppose I will have to
live with it.

------
pavlov
Missed chance to call this sneaky font “Times Trojan”?

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greendestiny_re
When faced with spacious word limits during my freelance writing gigs I often
go off on a wild tangent to fill in the quota. This one time I was asked to
write about diabetes and found myself mentioning Okinawa centegenerians, soy
cooking oil and forced swimming tests done on rats. It turned out interesting
in the end.

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JoshTriplett
> Similarly, Times Newer Roman is only useful for hitting larger page counts;
> if you have a strict word count limit, you’re out of luck.

For that, you'd want a font that includes ligatures to render things like "t h
e" as "the", so that it counts as three words but looks like one.

Hypothetically, of course.

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wodenokoto
In Denmark you have to supply word count or character count.

I mean, I guess you could say that a normal page is equal to x words or
characters, stuff your pages with wide margins and wide kerning and claim your
word count is x*pages+small_random_number ...

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PakG1
Reading the comments here, am I the only one who had the problem of writing
too much and trying to figure out how to fit within the required page limits?
:P Still trying to figure out how to not be so verbose. :(

~~~
noobermin
Not everyone is concise. I was not when I was 18 or 19.

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simongr3dal
In most essay or reports I've written the requirement was given in number of
pages, but always with the definition of a page being 2400 characters (I don't
remember wether that was with or without spaces).

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crtasm
I like that they point out it won't be of use if you're given a required
number of words rather than pages.

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rqs
Sneaky? Take look the side-by-side comparison, I found the right (wider) one
is easier for my eyes.

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dugluak
For some reason I associate the TNR font with hardcore technical documents.

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dis-sys
is there any font designed to make work emails look shorter?

------
Ricardus
This is fascinating to me. What a nice hack. I always enjoy it when people
find clever ways to undermine existing systems. I'll be installing this font
shortly!

