College fails to prepare us for the real world. I’m not just talking about the encouragement of binge drinking or the development of beer pong skills we will never use again. I am referring to the influence it has on our writing styles.
Throughout my entire education I have been haunted by the phrase “page minimum.” It is common practice for teachers and professors to place a page or word minimum on nearly all writing assignments. Presumably, this is to ensure that the students devote the appropriate amount of time and thought into the assignment, but does that really help make a paper better?
Consider the real-life implications. Would your boss put a page minimum on a report? Sure, he or she could ask for it to be thorough, but obviously setting a minimum does not assure thoroughness. Time is money and both would be wasted if your boss had to read an unnecessarily long document filled with winding logic, redundant paragraphs and overly verbose descriptions, put there to simply take up space and meet a requirement.
College is preparing us for a career and for a better life, but I fail to see how teaching students to dilute their papers better prepares them for the real world. Even in everyday life, it is important to use an economy of words. Saying too much can always pose a problem in a conversation and the idea of saying more than you should in a business negotiation could create some serious problems.
Far more important, I think, is the ability to distill an argument into its simplest, clearest understood form. That skill would truly make us better communicators and thus, better leaders.
As clever as we may think our ideas are, with serious thought, any idea could be summed up in one sentence. “I think therefore I am,” ”Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and “I came, I saw, I conquered” are examples of short sentences that say all they need to. I shudder to think that Descartes would have received an F for not saying more.
Writing is, at its core, an art form. It is not simple math and there is rarely a clear right and wrong answer. It is the job of the writer to convey his or her point and make a convincing argument one way or the other.
Having to worry about minimums and maximums could only serve to stifle this process. Consider the fact that the “Mona Lisa,” perhaps the most famous painting in the world, is less than 2 feet tall. Though surprisingly small, could anyone honestly say that da Vinci would have done a better job on a larger canvas?
In the end, it comes down to the simple fact that a paper is either good or it isn’t. There are 25-page papers that say nothing and fail to complete the assignment. And there are one-page papers that fully complete the task. It should be up to the student to decide whether he or she has written enough.
If I can say all that I need to say in five pages, why should I be punished because the professor randomly chose to set the minimum at six pages? With grammar, sentence structure, thesis statements, citations, syntax and conclusions serving as viable criteria to judge our writing both now and in our future, is it really necessary to constrain us even further with arbitrary restrictions on length?