[carlmr]

I blame schools for teaching kids to reach word limits, instead of how to express themselves concisely.

A prime example of Goodhart's law, or just finding an easy to check proxy for writing quality.

Of course another reason is that modern journalis has to include at least two paragraphs of enticing fluff so that readers buy the subscription.

[magicalhippo]

My SO had that problem with word limits at school. She would write 5 pages for a 300 word assignment, it was almost like a brain dump.

At college I helped her with her assignments after she was done writing. I didn't know her topic but just reordering sentences, deleting redundant ones and shortening others.

I started doing this after she failed an assignment and she asked for help. After we were done "post-processing" it, she got a B on it. We hadn't touched any of her technical points, just improved the language.

I now help my sister through something similar. She has the opposite. She'll write 300 words for a 1000 word assignment. Again I know nothing of her subject, but I'll do a similar post-processing. In the process I'll notice there are some gaps in her arguments perhaps, or things that aren't as fleshed out.

So I ask her about it and almost always she can tell me lots about the subject from the books and articles she's read as part of the curriculum. So I tell her to write it down, and after going through the assignment we're suddenly in the position where we have to trim some stuff.

I used to think word limits were somewhat silly, but now I see how they can help focus the unfocused or help tease out the knowledge. Both my SO and my sister improved over time, requiring much less help after a while.

Of course left to their own devices, it would likely be very difficult for them. So there's that.

Incidentally, language was never my favorite subject and I didn't do particularly well. However studying math helped me a lot with writing non-fiction, where things like consistent logical arguments matter.

[tcbawo]

The ability to tell an engaging and concise story without gaps is a difficult skill. I imagine it can be required through practice and attention. I have noticed a certain deficit in this regard with my own family and I would love to hear what techniques or exercises might help.

[EricE]

>I used to think word limits were somewhat silly, but now I see how they can help focus the unfocused or help tease out the knowledge.

Favorite quote (because I tend to be wordy): “I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.” ― Mark Twain

So much nuance in that simple sentence!

[saalweachter]

Do you think there is any problem with teachers setting word limits appropriately?

I could imagine novice teachers who haven't attempted the exercise themselves being off considerably -- over or under -- on the number of words needed to complete an assignment.

[magicalhippo]

So far I haven't seen much of that. There has been a few times were I told them to ask the teacher about clarification of the word count, like how bad would it be if we had 1300 instead of 1000. Sometimes the teacher would say OK if it was relevant stuff.

I can't recall any instance where either of them got a low grade for not fulfilling the assignment due to very limited word count. If you have 200 words it's impossible to go into deep details, that's just how it is.

Of course in those cases we often would have to do multiple passes to cut fluff, focus the arguments by cutting out details, find a word which might replace three others etc. We'd typically start with maybe 4-600 the words and work our way down to 200.

Of course as a teacher, if you just failed your entire class, maybe you need to look at yourself and the assignment you gave rather than the students.

I had one instance of that at high school. When handing back the assignments he loudly proclaimed "Well done, you did by far the best in class" as he handed me my assignment. I looked down and saw a D- on the paper.

The following class the teacher explained what he was looking for, and we would explain what we had learned earlier and he then filled in the gaps.

[marcos100]

> I blame schools for teaching kids to reach word limits, instead of how to express themselves concisely.

I thought the same in the past. But I think it's a good idea to enforce word limits to make them think more about the subject and to practice writing longer and complex texts.

The problem is that the teachers just impose a limit without explaining and then it just looks like some bullshit metric.

I think modern journalism is more about SEO and getting attention, not word limits imposed when we were in school (if you hate word limits, then you probably dind't continue writing longer texts)

[dorkwood]

They can also fit more ads into a longer article. That's arguably the most important thing.

[lelandfe]

On the web, content length is also typically seen as an SEO signal. Whether that’s a direct signal or just keyword stuffing, who knows.

[toyg]

> schools [...] subscription

None of that. Journalists simply want to feel like they are novelists, because, deep down, that's what most of them really wanted to be.