[Swizec]

> Reminded me of when I had to be extra wordy to meet the 1000 minimum word limit for my high school essays.

Minimum word lengths are the greatest dis-service high school and college have ever done to future communication skills. It takes years for people to unlearn this in the workplace.

Max word counts only please. Especially now with AI making it so easy to produce fluff with no signal.

[chao-]

I write the words that I hear in my head, as though I am speaking. With the exception of timed, in-class essays, I always turned in papers far in excess of any minimum during high school.

In college, I took a constructive writing course because I thought "Hey, easy A!" After the second or third week, the professor told me that, while the class had a word minimum, I would also be given a separate word maximum. She said I needed to learn brevity and simplicity, before anything else.

The point being: I was able to cruise through high school with my longwindedness as a cheat code, never stressing about minimum lengths, despite my writing being crap in other ways.

Although I have regressed in the two decades since, it helped me a good deal. I am grateful to that professor for doing that.

[Swizec]

I write a lot and have on several occasions tried dictation as an initial draft authoring step. It was trash every time.

Good for thinking through a concept but unsalvageable in the edit phase. Easier to throw away and rewrite now that you know what to say.

Nowadays I like conversation as an ideating step. Talk to a bunch of people, try to explain yourself until they get it, see what questions they ask. Sometimes in HN threads like this :)

Then write it down.

You get super high signal writing where every sentence is load bearing. I’ve had people take my documents and share them around the company as “this is how it’s done”

It can take weeks of work to produce a 500 word product vision document. And then several months to implement, even with AI.

[chao-]

Hmm... when I really care about the quality of something, I basically write what I think/speak, then try to edit it down by half. I don't find it unsalvageable, but the editing does require an order of magnitude more time than the initial draft of thoughts vomited into the keyboard.

[Swizec]

> I basically write what I think/speak

Me too. Try speech to text one day, you may find that you'll use 2x the words than you do with a typed vomit draft. I was surprised

[skirmish]

> It can take weeks of work to produce a 500 word product vision document.

Don't you get dinged as a slow performer? Management expects x5 speed on everything now that AI is available.

[Swizec]

> Don't you get dinged as a slow performer?

No because the document is not the work. Management wants someone to figure out the solution to their problems. The document is just a step in solutioning.

Without the doc, others would have to re-do all that work if you get hit by a bus. Or you’d be stuck in endless meetings conveying the vision instead of figuring out the next problem.

Document length is inversely proportional to the quality of your thinking/insight. When you create fluff, everyone can see you didn’t do the work.

[bumblehean]

It's going to depend on the type of team and environment you work in. Probably on how senior you are as well.

If your boss asks you for specific documents and expects a quick turnaround, and you regularly take 3 weeks or whatever to produce them, then yeah probably.

If your boss generally leaves you alone to find and solve problems on your own, then probably not.

[xoxxala]

I design boardgames and it's easy to write a lot of rules. It's more difficult to write concise rules. Most of my time is spent editing rules to their absolute minimum.

"I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal

[Geezus_42]

Reminds me of how I document procedures. I spend a significant amount of time thinking about how to write things so that I provide enough information for a Jr to understand each step (and hopefully learn something) without over explaining. Organization is also important.

[user_7832]

I ctr-F'd to search for this quote and am happy to see it mentioned.

Brevity is an art, and it is hard.

[aDyslecticCrow]

I had the opposite issue. Writing was agony and every section would be written, reviewed and rewritten to get my point across; only to be tortured by a miminum word count that was 20% away after saying all i cound think of saying.

I've gotten better at phrasing myself adequately in one go. Rute mechanical memorization has also made writing itself cheaper. (read my username)

I can now yap quite adequately over text, yet i regularly find AIs at a minimum 2x as verbose as my preferred phrasing after manual word mashing.

[amoss]

feels like this comment could be shorter

[lynguist]

But how is your writing fast enough that you don’t pause and drown the hearing in your head?

[chao-]

When writing on paper, either I will pause thinking enough, or will sometimes lose where a thought was going. I am much faster at typing than writing, so I end up with more, then edit/delete afterwards (if I feel like writing well). I am much worse at writing long-form thoughts than I was back in college, now that 99% of what I do is type.

An odd tradeoff of my verbal-based writing seems to be that I am a fairly slow reader. I read aloud in my head, albeit a bit faster than I could speak, but I still hear the words as an internal monologue.

When discussing this a few times with friends, I've learned how different everyone's experiences are when bridging thoughts=>speaking, thoughts=>writing, thoughts=>typing, and text=>thoughts (or even text=>understanding).

[Exoristos]

I'd like to see touch-typing at >60 wpm a standard attribute of adulthood again.

[robocat]

Same as the heavy focus on rewording in your own words: basically teaching you to plagiarise by cheating. I find it distasteful.

Even though almost copying is everywhere (patents, graphic design, business): albeit in other areas it is often applauded and less obviously deceptive.

We talk about countries copying e.g. Japan was notorious for it. I think the underlying motivation there is ownership - greedy people feeling they own everything (arts and technology). "We own that and you stole it from us" along with the entitlement of never recognizing when copying others.

[awakeasleep]

Minimum word lengths were really a terrible idea and I wonder what arguments were used to get all the teachers to buy into that system.

[yed]

Considering that many high school kids won’t want to put in any effort at all, how else do you convey the amount of detail and effort you expect for a given writing assignment? It’s an imperfect proxy but I can’t think of a better one.

[notahacker]

Yeah. 1000 words is not a long essay that requires padding, and any competent teacher marks an essay with 1000 words achieved mainly by repetition and bad sentence construction much lower than one discussing the subject matter in a suitable level of detail, and probably lower than a better- written essay which gets marks deducted for only having 985 words.

Since "write an essay" can be anything from three paragraphs to a 50 page paper and the teacher probably doesn't think either is the appropriate response to the task, some sort of numerical guide is a good starting point, even if a fairly wide range is a better guide than just a minimum...

(plus actually there are real world work tasks involving composing text that fits within a certain word range, and since being concise and focused isn't AI text generation's strong suit, I'm not sure those work tasks will disappear...)

[j_w]

Yeah, this is seemingly the only effective proxy for "write with some amount of depth." If the word count gets BS'd then it will be obvious when reading the output.

[Swizec]

> Yeah, this is seemingly the only effective proxy for "write with some amount of depth." If the word count gets BS'd then it will be obvious when reading the output.

My high school professors had a really good solution to this:

Minimum word lengths but you have to write the essay in class by hand. You have 2 periods.

Some of us still write a lot but having limited time and space (4 pages) really put a hard limit without saying so. In higher classes they started saying “I’m gonna stop reading after 3 pages so make sure you get to the point”

[j_w]

I spent 2 years (coincidentally the same teacher for two years) in high school where once a week the only thing done that period was to write an essay (by hand) on some topic/prompt given immediately before beginning.

The grading was thorough and harsh. In college I was never graded harder on writing. My writing and comprehension abilities improved dramatically over that period of time.

[SoftTalker]

With rubrics, or more simply the teacher could hand out an example essay at the start of the year that conveys the style and level of detail they are looking for when they assign an essay. Then they can refer to that when they make an assignment. Implicitly that gives a word count or number of pages, but allows for marking down for "too much repetition" or "needs more detail"

[watwut]

The ambiguous "needs more detail" thing would lead to a lot of students making it too brief in good faith, too long in good faith and both be frustrated and angry. You can write really good mini essay on a topic. And you can write really good super long essay on the same topic.

Demanding that students mind read is not a good strategy. Specifying expected length, checking for it is a good strategy. Teacher should also check for other things - whether paragraphs logically follow, grammar, sentence structure, you name it. But dont make them guess.

[SoftTalker]

A good rubric would remove a lot of this ambiguity.

[watwut]

Unless it contains also minimal and maximal length, it wont. You just cant get away with not making those two clear and transparent.

[tayo42]

When the teacher goes to grade it? If you turn in one sentence with or without a minimum your getting an F...

[SoftTalker]

Many schools these days don't allow an "F" grade if the student makes any effort at all.

[Geezus_42]

Source please.

[SoftTalker]

Wife teaches 4th grade. They cannot give an "F" if the student turns something in. Only for completely missing work.

[voxl]

Have a second of critical thinking on this topic will make it abundantly obvious why this line of questioning is anti-education and anti-intellectual. You write in school to practice. No just composition, but grammar, spelling, individual sentences. Practice requires volume.

Subject yourself to a classroom of kids that you must teach to write, and throw out minimums. Will some students do fine? Sure, of course, and what of the others that turn in one sentence? That never grow? That have to go into the math class and hear their idiot parents say "why are you learning that we have calculators"

[there_is_try]

Why not have the students write more essays instead?

[pixelpoet]

> Subject yourself to a classroom of kids that you must teach to write, and throw out minimums.

Strawman argument; the correct thing to do is not to throw out minimum word count and leave it at that, rather to emphasize the role of brevity and concision while still being sufficiently thorough.

It's widely understood that LOC is a poor measure for many coding purposes, so it shouldn't be controversial that word count is an equally flawed measure for prose.

[voxl]

This ENTIRE argument is about whether or not minimum word count is a good idea, perhaps improve your reading comprehension before pretending to know logical fallacies

[pixelpoet]

Almost your entire post history is angry and confrontational, just like here, and I was also talking about whether or not word counts are a good idea, obviously; right back at you about reading comprehension.

[al_borland]

It can help to force depth into a topic that requires it, and more expression and emotion into writing where that is of value. It also forces the writer to think more deeply about the topic and organize their thoughts.

While I hated it in high school, but think I better understand it now. I think part of the problem is they never explained the "why" or the "how", just the requirement. I wasn't able to write anything more than a page or two without extreme difficultly until college when the requirements went up to 30 pages.

In theory, someone who can write a 30 page paper could effectively distill it down to a short memo when needed, summarizing their primary point(s). Someone who can only write short memos would have a hard time writing something longer one day if/when required. I was trying to do a knowledge transfer one day, opened up Word, and just typed 20 pages on everything I knew about a tool we used heavily, but wasn't documented anywhere. I don't think I could have done that before I was forced to write those longer papers in college.

[ijk]

Where I encounter it at the higher education level is that academic-level research almost universally has maximum word counts or page counts rather than minimums: if you think you can get your point across in fewer words, you should. No reviewer is going to object to the paper being too short, so long as you succeeded in making your case.

John Nash's Ph.D. Thesis is notorious for being short: it's still 27 pages (typed, with hand-written equations and a whopping total of two citations) but that's an order of magnitude below average. On the other hand, most of us don't invent game theory.

Students used to minimum-word-count essays sometimes have to do some self-retraining to realize that the expectation is that you have more that you want to say than you have room to say it, and the game is now to figure out how to say more in fewer words.

[getmoheb]

Off topic, and not to diminish Nash's work, but quite famously (I thought) Von Neumann and Morgenstern did a bit of the 'inventing' too, and a bit earlier

[iterateoften]

It’s easier to judge an objective output like number of words than subjective like quality.

Same as lines of code, etc.

[abathur]

I guess, but have you actually encountered a teacher grading an assignment solely based on word count?

I certainly wish more teachers encouraged parsimony and penalized fluff and bullshittery, but I'd be surprised to find them doing it outside of some narrow cases where the point is just to make you write something at all.

Tthey generally want to encourage their students to engage with the topic at a certain level and practice the thinking needed to research, structure, and implement an argument of a certain length. They want you to put at least 5 pounds of idea in the 5-10 pound idea bag.

If you're convinced you've hacked word economy and satisfied the assignment except for this goshdarnpeskyminimumwordcount, you're probably misunderstanding the lesson the instructor is willing to read through a bunch of bad writing to impart and cheating yourself.

[mold_aid]

That's actually the trick. If you assign word count, MLA style, grammar, you just have to look for the errors. You don't have to engage with the ideas at all, or provide conversational feedback - just cryptic notes in the margins, like "???" or "awk"

[supertrope]

Journalists and writers are often given a deadline and a target length. "Give me 500 words of copy by the end of tomorrow." The editor and publisher of a magazine need to get all words and graphics ready by a strict and regular deadline.

[ranger207]

The idea was to get people to include more substance. Instead of just saying "Washington crossed the Delaware" to get students to include reasons why, impacts, further narrative, etc. IDK if it was effective or not. Probably at least a little; there's only so many ways to rewrite the same thing over and over. I know in my case though I submitted essays below the word count a few times, but since I actually included the content they were looking for I didn't have any problems

[flemhans]

We had maximum word counts