It seems I’m on a roll here, I’m doing 3 posts in one day. It’s coming at a cost though, I still haven’t done all the essays that were set over the winter holiday. For the moment I’m going to rage at something which has bothered me since I tried writing those damned essays: the word count.
Any essay must contain over a certain amount of words. The teacher assumes that the higher the word count the more effort will be put into the piece. This is a fallacy. I’ve been reading that 140 characters book and time and time again it asserts the concept that someone can communicate more with less. Keep it simple. Add surplus information to words. Use concise vocabulary. I remember one teacher joking that they marked coursework based on the number of pages it contained. I hope that joke didn’t have any truth behind it.
It’s tragic when information can be conveyed so simply yet it is disguised within layers upon lines of unnecessary text. Arguments and ideas are distilled with turgid ambiguous verbosity.
A reduction in padding and waffle makes communication easier for both the writer and the reader. This post contains 390 words; nobody’s grading me on it and I don’t care how much I write as long as I’m satisfied others will understand it.
The second irritating thing is that I write this because I enjoy it. Some essays I don’t enjoy, take this one for example:
To what extent do you agree with the statement that ‘knowledge is power’?
That’s from a General Studies paper. What am I supposed to write? On a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is strongly agree and 1 is strongly disagree I agree to the extent of 7/10 because… [various reasons]
Apparently I get the opportunity to score 30 marks for that question; no criteria is cited on how to gain these marks. I was given the paper without the mark scheme, so am I encouraged to use my intuition to guess what will get me marks, what if I guess wrong, will I have written a bad answer?
A wise person once told me that whatever my principles are, the exam always comes first. Ah, I should keep my mouth shut then. I should study the answers first and ask questions later. What I really should do is stop listening to you.
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