[atmavatar]

> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today

Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not?

In an age where there's a million things demanding your attention, a 20-page article is asking for a lot of someone's time, and my experience has been that 19-and-a-half of those pages are nearly always filler. The student commenting they kept losing track of what the paper was about suggests the assigned article probably follows the same pattern.

A writer that meanders about most of their article with mostly unnecessary setup before getting to their point in the last paragraph is disrespectful of their readers' time and undeserving of a full read-through, in my opinion.

A common trope I see in longer articles is to give detailed narratives of one or more people's life stories before finally telling me about some recent struggle they've run into, as if I was both interested in their biographies and incapable of empathizing with their struggles otherwise. I can feel bad for someone whose tap water is flammable without having to read they were a girl scout and a national merit scholar who helped a neighbor escape a house fire and now houses local homeless people in their basement.

[throwaway2016a]

> Looking at the other half of this complaint: cannot or will not?

This. I'm 40 and getting my MBA part time while working and being a parent and I can tell you even as an adult: when you hand me a 20 page case study I will read it but I'm going to be swearing under my breath the whole time.

In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot.

My daughter (10) routinely reads 400+ page books meant for kids older than her, but give her a 200 page book in class and she struggles with it even though it's a lower reading level because it is a chore.

[Balgair]

> In today's day and age reading anything long is asking a lot.

No offense here, but I mean, they are in college. They are there to be asked a lot of. That's kinda the point.

[throwaway2016a]

Is it? I thought the point was to learn. Most reading is just busy work that doesn't actually advance the learning objectives.

[Balgair]

What kind of college are you going to? I wasn't a humanities major, but had to take a lot of credit hours there. None of the readings were ever busy work. Now, I really didn't want to do them and I very much resented having to do credit work in the first place, granted. But in terms of the classes, none of the readings were ever pointless. If anything, we never had enough time to even do the readings that we really should have - the courses should have been longer. If you are seeing the readings as just busy assignments, you really need to talk with the professor and try to figure out if you're in the right class or not.

[throwaway2016a]

My undergrad was in computer science and my master's is a MBA. Both from good schools (think top 50 not top 5).

I was thinking more like text books. Text books authors are generally much more wordy than they need to be because the publishing industry and academia awards length. But with that said, I kind of disagree with you a bit on biz school work. I'd say a quarter of most HBR case studies are fluff. I don't mean throw 12 on the floor and 3 are fluff, I mean, take a 12 page case study and 3 of the pages are not adding value.

Articles are even worse because the pay is often by the word and there are min lengths to get into the print edition.

Speaking from experience. I actually wrote a book for a major publisher and the main metric that determined how much I got paid was page count. We had a page count decided before the first word outside of the proposal was written.

[Balgair]

I think we're talking apples and oranges here.

I was speaking about the assignment itself, not the writing therein.

Sure, you can throw out about 80 pages of War and Peace where he just blabs about soviet farming practices.

I'm not an MBA guy, so I can't speak to the curriculum in Biz Schools, but I can say that what you say does come across with most MBAs I have met. In that they think similarly about their education being about the networking and not really about the material.

Which is a shame really for both of our sides of this all.

I think you are saying that the publishers are essentially paying for minimum words / word count. Which is the opposite of what any writing upperdivision teacher would tell you about writing. And I'm saying that you are getting busy work assigned from the professor in the first place (and then saying that i haven't experienced that).

The solution is to have the students take charge of their education and be less passive. If the assignments are bad (in selection or in writing) then the student should challenge the teacher on it.

Yeah, that's a harder way to do things, yes, but I think anyone out of school for anytime will agree that it would be a better way.

Thank you for sharing you experience with me all the same.