[lbotos]

It's an interesting question. I'd personally love to see more effort being given to "defend your point as succinctly as possible." I wrote a lot of "minimum word count essays and in the "real world" clarity trumps length every day.

Length is used as some proxy for rigor, but we know it's only a proxy.

[onos]

I like this idea. Fwiw I feel I learned / grew a lot more in one technical writing class in college than I did in all my years of English classes. Later I picked ip a book “writing with style” that was also quite helpful.

One issue for me in English was I really was not interested in the kinds of essays the English teachers were interested in having us write, eg coming up with a thesis on plot themes in Shakespeare. Just not my thing and so I couldn’t get anywhere in those classes.

[HWR_14]

I found that in elementary or secondary school page minimums were used to as a cheap proxy for effort. In college page maximums started appearing to encourage concision. Different needs for students at different points in their education.

[adelie]

My high school English teacher adamantly refused to read any essay over the length of one page, double-spaced. I learned more from that class than any other writing class I took.

[endtime]

+100

When I write today, for work, the challenge is always to write less. My VP might have time to read two pages; he's almost certainly not going to read anything longer.