I remember back in college in the 90s having a lot of difficulty with the required length of writing assignments. I used all the tricks of squishing margins and larger font to make whatever it was I wrote look like there was more to it than there was. Now, I'm in college again in the 20s, and I have writing assignments. I don't know if the requirements have changed or I have, but writing assignments of at least 300 words? I can write you 300 words about my breakfast. Maybe I just talk too much.
@mike Oh god, same. I struggled to meet the required word count in undergrad, but now I'm regularly writing 5000 words for a 3000-word report and panic-culling 2000 of them. Thank goodness for appendices?
@lulu_powerful Right? I had to go between 300-400 words. A pittance really. My submitted assignment was 399 words after some pretty liberal cuts to content.
@grimmy Right? I checked and my initial post was 95 words long. Two more Mastodon posts and I'm done with my homework. Doesn't seem like that's a hard mark to hit, especially since I had to take some things out of my post just to keep it under 500 characters.
@mike as time goes on, being able to write under a certain word-count is more a skill than being able to write over the word-count. Being able to write well about all the important stuff without making the reader suffer forever becomes the most important aspect.
@Swidilator I agree, but I think (and this could very well be wrong) that since this is a first year college course, most of the individuals taking it are 17 18 19 year olds, and getting them to write can be a lot harder than getting a geezer like me to pontificate endlessly about some random subject.
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