Comments on: NextPath - 13 Things I Wish I Learned in College http://faganm.com/blog/2007/01/21/815/ The personal weblog of Michael Fagan Fri, 21 Nov 2008 23:09:02 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=1.5 by: Mattt http://faganm.com/blog/2007/01/21/815/#comment-7054 Mon, 22 Jan 2007 02:05:23 -0800 http://faganm.com/blog/2007/01/21/815/#comment-7054 <p>Word counts / page counts are stupid. Outside of the insane people who write too much (and I&#8217;m not talking about the people who write too much trash), I&#8217;ve never met a person who hits the page count spot-on. You&#8217;ve always got to go back and add a bit here or there to make it x pages. Or maybe you added a bit here or there as you went along writing it the first time.</p> <p>With my KGB essay in PSCI last semester, I had to give up at 11/15 pages because there wasn&#8217;t any more to say. But I could have explain it with 1 page even. Heck, I could explain it to you in one sentence: Russia is screwed.</p> <p>But the worst part is that you&#8217;re not even doing anything original. You &#8220;research&#8221; tens or hundreds of pages that other people wrote and researched and then summarise it in &#8220;your own words&#8221;. What does this really add to society? Nothing. Yeah, it increased my personal knowledge of the subject but it doesn&#8217;t prove anything beyond a) I can read and b) I know how to find synonyms. </p> Word counts / page counts are stupid. Outside of the insane people who write too much (and I’m not talking about the people who write too much trash), I’ve never met a person who hits the page count spot-on. You’ve always got to go back and add a bit here or there to make it x pages. Or maybe you added a bit here or there as you went along writing it the first time.

With my KGB essay in PSCI last semester, I had to give up at 11/15 pages because there wasn’t any more to say. But I could have explain it with 1 page even. Heck, I could explain it to you in one sentence: Russia is screwed.

But the worst part is that you’re not even doing anything original. You “research” tens or hundreds of pages that other people wrote and researched and then summarise it in “your own words”. What does this really add to society? Nothing. Yeah, it increased my personal knowledge of the subject but it doesn’t prove anything beyond a) I can read and b) I know how to find synonyms.

]]>