Words

Jan 16, 2009 at 7:51 AM
3 comments

Let me begin by saying that I'm not casting any aspersions nor am I judging anyone here, this is more a general piece of writing on something I noticed this morning about how some people struggle to write. I wont name any names, but throughout the night I was getting status messages from Facebook almost on the hour as to the writing progress of someone writing a 2000 word essay; it seemed to me that they were managing to write between a hundred and three hundred words an hour.

I know that writing a piece of blogging fodder is much easier, nobody is going to be marking this and regardless of its content, it's not going to affect my future in any way, shape or form. But saying this, when I was back in university over a decade ago, because I had an interest in the subject that I was studying and had a fair idea what was required of me in a piece of writing, I could easily write up a few thousand words without any difficulty, in fact, pairing it down to the required word count was my problem, as you may have noticed I tend to ramble on, and on, and on....

Again it got me thinking, why do tutors stipulate a word count on the papers they set? Surely the content of the writing should be the most important aspect of the essay, not how many words you can waffle on for, or how little words you use to be able to cram the needed information in the essay. Surely the merit should be given on a shorter piece of writing that contains all the valid information to answer the question posted.

I realise it gives you a general parameter to work to, so that everyone knows what is required, but it still seems a little silly to me. Anyhow, that's got that little piece of brain bubbling out of the way, feel free to comment.

Oh, that was about 350 odd words or so if anybody was interested, took me about five minutes to write... ;)

3 comments

Comments

I've also been thinking about that from time to time. It seems unessecery complicated, as well as it scares the student somewhat. They -have- to have 2000 word counts, focusing on that would make them focus less on what they are writing. In some respect. But hey..

I'm not sure but I always thought that the word count was there not to hinder the people that don't write many words but for the people who ramble on and on and on.

Just so they don't write a 500,000 word essay, have all the infor in it but also lots of crap, and then get top marks.

Well, my teachers imposed the word count to actually make us write concise and compact texts. Apparently most of us also had a problem to scale down our texts, I know I did for sure. And writing compact texts is actually a very useful skill.

Words

Comments

Post a comment

About Me

My Groups

Neighborhood

Archives