Why Do Words Count?
If I’m MIA a bit these days it is because I’m trying to study. I have a take home exam this weekend which needs to be completed in just 80 hours.
Despite my best intentions I spent most of last weekend working on an assignment that was due on Monday. I actually finished the first draft on Saturday afternoon, but spent Saturday evening, a few hours on Sunday and a couple more on Monday morning getting it under the word count.
Now we’re not talking silly word counts here. The assignment called for 1500 words. My first draft, lacking an introduction and conclusion totalled over 1900 words.
After hours of reading, re-reading, re-drafting, and proof reading by 3 different people, I managed to get to total of the body down to 1200 words, which actually left me with a few more than needed to write a killer introduction and conclusion.
But why do words count so much? Why do I have to spend more time trying to get my answer under the word limit than actually doing the assignment?
I get that I prattle on a bit, and I was somewhat repetative, but even removing all the guff I’m used to writing because Business subjects ask for 3000 word essays and I totally always went for the +/- 10% rule (ok, the minus part of it anyway) in those but apparently they don’t do that in law and when they say 1500 words they mean a maximum 1500 words and not a single one more, I was still sitting around the 1600 words.
And yes, reading hundreds of answers to the same problem must get terribly tedious, but this is an exercise in answering a legal problem, not paring an answer down to the absolute minimum number of words possible to get your message accross.
I removed quotes, cases that I thought were relevant, but simply did not have the room to leave in, and spent hours with my step-mother rewording things to cut just a few words from each sentence.
Wouldn’t it have been better if I’d had that time to make sure I actually had the right answer in the first place?
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I do remember, back in school, our teacher would set us to writing a 3 page essay, then some kids would write 3 normal pages, some would write with really large handwriting, effectively filling three pages with three paragraphs, a few kids who had really small handwriting would hand in 3 pages which would take hours to read, practically a novel. This is probably why word limits are set. Makes it difficult though, when you have to count the words, then edit, recount, edit some more……
Nothing changes re word limits you know - I was told to write something in 500 words or less! So I feel your pain…..
One of my lecturers used to only mark the first 1,500, 2,000 or whatever the word limit was. If you only answered half the question in that many words, you were only ever going to get a maximum of half marks. Good policy I think. Teaches people to be concise and to the point.