Bret Devereaux

I want to riff on this at more length. My current paper-length thinking - I haven't yet implemented it in all of my courses, but I'm slowly doing so - is to pattern the lengths of assignments explicitly off of common article length guidelines in actual publishing 1/6https://twitter.com/jpnudell/status/1440733190281252868 …

So the short paper is 800 words (fairly standard op-ed or review), the mid-sized paper is 1,200-1,400 words (ye-standard-think-piece) and the Big Damn Research Paper is c. 5,000 words (the Long Form Article). That's c. 2-3, 4-5 and 15-20 pages double-spaced respectively. 2/6

And then I make the connection explicit in the assignment. "In a paper of 800 words [about the length of an op-ed in a newspaper]." 3/6

Two major advantages I'm trying to get here: 1) shorter papers sharpen writing. Students have to make more decisions about what to say and what to cut, which are important skills in actual writing, both in daily life or in publication. 4/6

2) by making the connection explicit, I hope to answer that nagging questions students might have as to 'when am I ever going to use them' - a college student ought to think they might one day want to write an op-ed about an important issue. 5/6

It connects the artificial form they are learning, The College Essay, with the actual forms that we are supposed to be teaching them to be able to produce. Naturally I still make them write it like an essay (footnotes, etc), but at least with a more practical length. end/6