I have noticed in my never ending battle to complete the Doctorate that the word length of the thesis seems to be almost as important as content. The arbitrary setting of word lengths for a dissertation is not consistent with the modern world. The world requires succinct arguments expressed in format suitable for quick comprehension. Your boss and, indeed, just about very form of administrative or decision-making body wants brevity. There is too much information to be absorbed in a reduced time frame. Why are people setting minimums for dissertation length when we should be setting maximums? Surely, if somebody, with an original work, can demonstrate its worthiness and originality in a few pages, this enhances rather than detracts from its value. The markers should insist upon it being succinct and readily comprehensible in a shortened time frame. Academia may be out of step with reality.
Only in degreemills does the world of the two page dissertation exist. Degreemills believe that humans are not capable of producing literary works advancing society, enhancing human thought and conciousness, promoting peace, and unleashing the knowledge of our universe. To set limits to human creativity and intellectual potential is to deny our lust for knowledge.
Who knows? Maybe the profs who wrote the rules on minimum dissertation lengths way back when had their undies all up in a bunch about how all those doctoral candidates of theirs back in the Sixties and Seventies thought that turning in one piece of paper with one period in the bottom right corner ought to suffice for the PhD in Minimalist Art.
Poor quality content should fail. The arbitrary word length does not alter the poor content, just extends the pain for the reader, and the student still fails. I guess my point of view is that content should be the test rather than arbitrary lengths. Some degrees in technology/science have moved on to new rules for examination of the research i.e. a physical outcome etc I recently got caught between the two poles. I was preparing a business report and "over-reported". Needless to say, the reader was not pleased. I then realised I had adjusted my style because of my doctorate studies. Maybe I am "overanalysing"and a bit of Ockham's razor would be useful. I had started off being short on word lengths, and now I am editing to reduce them. My arguments perhaps have been extended to meet the criteria of the word length. I wonder how many others have noticed this happening.
Yes, Academia is out of step... They want to make sure that you are a good little hoop jumper. The arbitrary page requirements are meant to squash the last dim spark of creativity out of your soul. The whole point of academia, it seems, is to be out step. Everything we know about learning is very rarely modeled in the university. The lecture method of teaching came about because no one could afford books. The students took notes and THAT was their book. We learn from our interactions with our instructors, our peers, and the learning materials. There is very little that happens in universities that recognizes or promotes this. Universities are typically 300 to 400 years behind the times. Ironically, the new technologies of distance learning, (blogs, podcasting, wikis, etc.) are turning things on their heads again and we are in a place, technologically (with the facilitation of the instructor), where the students can write their own books and engage in their subject matter in a creative way.
I was never given a minimum of words when preparing the dissertation. There is no point to have lots of words with no substance. I think that the impact of the dissertation should be measured by the number of publications generated from the work and the number of citations from other researchers to your dissertation. At the end, if your work is not able to impact others then your work has no meaning but to give you a piece of paper.
Important topic I write for a living just as surely as Hemingway or Danielle Steele or George F. Will did or does. My writing covers different subject matter perhaps than these do, but the product for which I am paid, the thing I do to earn my keep, is words on paper. I did not learn to do this in high school, college or law school. I got fairly good at it through the first ten years of law practice. I got much better at it during the last three years in my present position. I still need to improve. I have become a bitter critic of 75% of the legal writing I see, much of it from experience lawyers and large firms. I have to wade through their verbal swamps myself, you see. Bad writing obscures their arguments and wastes my time. Good legal writing, on the other hand, is a delight. The SOLE function of writing is to convey data I've found and opinions I've reached from MY brain to my reader's brain. Anything in style, layout, language choice, spelling, syntax, even font size and paper color that does not contribute to the reader's understanding has NO PLACE in my writing. Now this is true of ALL writing, I think. Mere verbage included for "bulk" or to "show off" the writer's mastery of a subject is worthless and worse than worthless. Why is it so hard to learn to write cleanly, I wonder? Could it be because teachers from elementary school forward seem to like LONG papers? When a new clerk comes to work for me, I ask him to read "The Old Man and the Sea" for an idea of the writing style I want him to use. I also suggest that he watch the writing scene in the film "A River Runs Through It" to get an idea of HOW to write cleanly. Good writing COUNTS!
I think you´re right, Nosborne. Many of the writers I like are not philologists nor English (or Spanish) majors. They are lawyers or at least, they have law degrees. I guess the synthesis capacity, the detail definition ability, the accuracy and proportion of the adjectives used, and other things like that is what make them awesome writers. Regards.
Re: Important topic I had the good fortune to complete a required graduate-level writing and research course this quarter. I say "good fortune" because one of our textbooks is Zinsser's "On Writing Well". In my view, this book is the absolute antidote to bad writing. It has definitely changed the way I practice the craft of writing. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060006641/sr=8-1/qid=1142444451/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-2892558-5975338?%5Fencoding=UTF8 Echoing what you've observed, Zinsser spends a lot of effort demonstrating that good writing requires letting go of verbosity. This sounds simple but actually requires a lot of practice to develop the habit. Specifically, it takes discipline to write in a way that leaves time for two or three revisions. These revisions are necessary to pare, chop, slash sentences down to the bare essentials.
Messed up that quote somehow. I probably need some advice about that as well! In any case, thanks for the information on the book.
Osborne: Good choice of Hemmingway as a model. That feller could write a little. And he sure didn't learn a whit of it in the academies--thank goodness or we'd never have heard of him--he learned it in the grind of a newspaper, with an editor screaming over his shoulder. I hate modern legal writing. It's akin to that which exits the rump of a barnyard animal. You might also have those clerks read a bit of John Marshall. There's another guy who could reason and write and pull one over on Congress and the Executive with the best of them. And he sure wasn't an academic. I've only learned to write since I got away from that ivory place, by reading people like all of the above, along with Twain and good translations of the Russians and the like. But Papa Hemmingway's my hands-down favorite.
Re: Yes, Academia is out of step... Somewhere between a long time ago and now, we went from the Esteemed Professor to the Nutty Professor. Why this is the case is a complex tale worthy of 100,000 heavily footnoted words (80,000, if you are working on your PhD in South Africa). Not only is academia out of step, we actually get it exactly backwards in many ways. For example, on the workplace, if you do not know something, you ask your coworkers for help. In school, this is called 'cheating'. On the workplace, you make mistakes and move on; there are no grades. In school, your transcripts are permanent; if you felt bad the morning of your Calculus final, back when you were 19 years old, you have failed Calculus for the rest of your life.
I agree that quality writing and original thinking should be the point of the dissertation. However, I also think it needs to be rigorous. I think there is value in reviewing other people's work and considering it in the document. The ultimate point is an original idea that leads to new information. At OSU I saw disserations range form 60 to 500 pages. My primary professor told me I would be done when I answered the querstion...not one page sooner and not one page longer.
"Please forgive me for writing such a long letter. I did not have the time to write a short one." -Sir Winston Churchill I hate being expected to read overly wordy documents. That being said I would still expect at the level of a PhD a paper would be lengthy. If the quality was high but the length was short by 200 words; I don't think the subsequent addition would improve the quality. In fact, I have no doubt it would lessen it.
