Stop Assigning 500 Word Essays

Some of the questions that drive every teacher crazy include:

·         “Does spelling count?”

·         “Why do we have to know this?”

·         “Will this be on the test?”

If you’re a homeschooling parent or a classroom teacher and you assign a paper, you will inevitably get this one: “How long does it have to be?”

How do you answer? Those of us who were educated in typical school classrooms probably remember being given 500-word or 800-word essays. Is that the way to do it? Just pluck an arbitrary round number out of your head and make it the minimum?

The question reminds me of an anecdote in William E. Curtis’s The True Abraham Lincoln, in which the President was traveling by train with two men of dissimilar body shapes. One had long legs and the other short ones. They were teasing each other and asked Honest Abe to settle the dispute: “How long should a man’s legs be?”

He replied, “I have not given the matter much consideration, but on first blush I should judge they ought to be long enough to reach from his body to the ground.”

It’s a silly answer to a silly question. And it’s why I sometimes answer students who ask me how long their paper should be, “Long enough to get from the beginning to the end.”

Why We Do It

The reason classroom teachers assign papers of an arbitrary required length is pragmatic. Teachers must grade fairly, so it is necessary to establish a baseline for how much work is expected of students. Otherwise, Susie Studious would turn in a 20-page paper and Agatha Apathy would turn in a page and a half. There’s no way to equitably assign a grade to projects that have required such disparate levels of effort. So, teachers have to be clear about how much work is expected.

The problem is that this reinforces bad writing habits. It encourages wordiness. That’s right—assigning a 500 word essay encourages students to write badly.

I remember how it went: I’d write the paper and count the words (We had to count them by hand back then!) It was always a bit short, say 425  or 462. What would I do? Look for an additional supporting point or illustration? Add some detail or delve more deeply into a particular concept? Of course not.  I’d go back and add as many words as possible to my existing sentences.

Instead of writing, The French Revolution failed to bring about a classless, egalitarian society, I’d write,

The revolution that took place in France in the 18th Century completely and utterly failed in its primary objective, which was to bring about a society where there are no social classes and all people are treated with total equality.

And just like that I get twenty-nine words closer to my goal.

But that revised sentence isn’t better. It’s just longer. Good teachers call this padding and penalize it, but what they often fail to realize is that the very nature of the assignment encourages this kind of writing. By basing the grade, even in part, on the number of words a paper contains, teachers communicate that excess verbiage is a good thing.

WriteAtHome assignments come with a suggested length in terms of pages. For example, we might suggest a report be two to three pages long. Originally, we didn’t include this information, but we were so bombarded by questions about required length that we gave in a bit. It was easier to give a broad guideline than tell the Abraham Lincoln story. Our writing coaches just know not to pay much attention to a paper’s length per se. It’s about quality, not quantity.

The truth is, we think a paper’s length should be determined by its content and purpose, not arbitrarily prescribed. Some stories just take longer to tell than others. Some topics require more explanation. Some arguments demand more detail to be convincing.

Of course, some papers are too short, and it’s typical for our writing coaches to suggest ways to improve papers by adding more content. But that’s a subjective decision based on the paper’s purpose, not on a prescribed word count.

Since we are working with individual writers in a tutorial program (rather than a competitive, graded, classroom situation), we are under no pressure to level the playing field arbitrarily, and if you are homeschooling, neither do you!

Avoiding word-count demands allows us to encourage concise, economical writing rather than excessively verbose writing.

So, when a student asks, “How long does this have to be?” you can answer, “Long enough to get from the beginning to the end.”