"When you say '8 Pages'..."

Part of our training involved reading a paper written by a previous writing consultant for the Core class (a part of Richmond academia that no longer exists) and then mercilessly sabotaged to turn a previously well-written paper into a gold mine of consulting material. One of my biggest problems with the piece was the fact that the writer talked in circles, saying the same thing over and over again. And who can really blame him when writers like John Locke have been doing the same thing for centuries? Try reading Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and you will quickly understand what I am talking about.

Repeating the same thought, slightly rephrased, throughout the course of a work can be a useful tool for emphasis. It says, “this thing that I am saying is so important that I am going to say it again to make sure you didn’t miss it the first time.” But simply rephrasing the same thought multiple times in a single paragraph or ad nauseum throughout a work surpasses the realm of clarification and emphasis and enters the world of unnecessary, tedious, and sloppy.

This whole endeavor with the Core paper got me thinking about something: word and page limits. Any time a professor assigns a paper with a page limit, the first question that follows is whether that page limit is a minimum, maximum, or suggestion. At one point in a class last semester, one of the students even asked, “When you say eight pages, do you mean to the bottom of the page or just on to the eighth page?” The professor responded that he always had an affinity for the bottom of the page, but the message the student sent was obvious: how much work do you really want from me?

Valerie Perry discussed the idea that when writing, certain papers are for “writing to learn,” others for “learning to write,” and then, often, another set is simply “writing to get it done.” The problem here is that the combination of students “writing to get it done” and professors’ strict enforcement of page limits or, even more, word limits, is that you end up engaged in a game of stretching. The result is often this constant repetition and recycling of ideas throughout a paper, because rephrasing the same thought half a dozen times takes up more space than saying it just once. And this does not even delve into the issue of font and margin play that everyone has learned at some point. (The difference between leaving Word’s “Widow/Orphan Control” option on and switching it off can be several lines of text, which add up in a 10 page term paper.)

The result, then, is often a weaker paper than it would have been if the same point had only been made once or twice. Saying that man’s goal in life is to achieve happiness and happiness is what men live for in two successive sentences ultimately weakens the argument for the purpose of hitting a word limit.