Well, are you talking about higher academia, or earlier schooling too? ie, there’s always the classic “your paper must be at least X pages long”, which in college professors will explicitly say that you have to unlearn.
your paper must be at least X pages long … college professors will explicitly say that you have to unlearn
Funny—I find paper lengths to be a good guide to just how much I need to unpack my arguments. And these requirements never go away—try sending a 202 word abstract to a journal that asked for 200.
Do you mean something like “This is really short. I’m probably skipping a bunch of steps in my reasoning and need to spell it out more explicitly” or do you mean something else?
And the abstract thing is about upper limits vs what I was talking about, which was lower limits.
Do you mean something like “This is really short. I’m probably skipping a bunch of steps in my reasoning and need to spell it out more explicitly” or do you mean something else?
Kindof something else, though I think you get the idea.
For any paper, you can always explain more steps in your reasoning, define your terms better, or bring out more of your assumptions. One of the good heuristics for determining how much you need to do this is to consider your audience. However, when writing for a class for your professor, you don’t really have this luxury (if you’re writing on something noncontroversial, your argument could be written as a conclusion followed by ‘you already know the rest’). Since part of the purpose of writing the paper for the class is to demonstrate whether you understand the material, you need to explain to the professor things he already knows. Paper length is a good rough heuristic to let you know just how much of that you need to do in the course of your argument.
Both, and other contexts as well. Large corporate environments often work under the constraint of “use only standard, safe software tools like Microsoft Word or Java”. It’s just that those sort of constraints aren’t internalized as frequently.
Well, are you talking about higher academia, or earlier schooling too? ie, there’s always the classic “your paper must be at least X pages long”, which in college professors will explicitly say that you have to unlearn.
Funny—I find paper lengths to be a good guide to just how much I need to unpack my arguments. And these requirements never go away—try sending a 202 word abstract to a journal that asked for 200.
What do you mean?
Do you mean something like “This is really short. I’m probably skipping a bunch of steps in my reasoning and need to spell it out more explicitly” or do you mean something else?
And the abstract thing is about upper limits vs what I was talking about, which was lower limits.
Kindof something else, though I think you get the idea.
For any paper, you can always explain more steps in your reasoning, define your terms better, or bring out more of your assumptions. One of the good heuristics for determining how much you need to do this is to consider your audience. However, when writing for a class for your professor, you don’t really have this luxury (if you’re writing on something noncontroversial, your argument could be written as a conclusion followed by ‘you already know the rest’). Since part of the purpose of writing the paper for the class is to demonstrate whether you understand the material, you need to explain to the professor things he already knows. Paper length is a good rough heuristic to let you know just how much of that you need to do in the course of your argument.
Both, and other contexts as well. Large corporate environments often work under the constraint of “use only standard, safe software tools like Microsoft Word or Java”. It’s just that those sort of constraints aren’t internalized as frequently.