Why do professors give minimum length requirements when assigning papers, especially in grad school? I'm working on a paper right now that's supposed to be 8-10 pages, and I'm onto the seventh page, but I feel like I've covered everything I need to cover and that anything else I add will be merely fluff. :(
Maximum lengths are different. If a professor wants me to cover something in 2 pages that I could write for 10 pages about, she is forcing me to boil my thoughts down to the essence of the issue and get rid of any fluff. That makes a lot more sense, but I guess if the professors want to give themselves a bunch of extra pages of fluff to read, there's not a whole lot I can do about that.
1 comment:
I agree that minimum lengths are silly. While I can't answer for your professors' reactions, I can give you my method for dealing with such ridiculosity: I always just wrote until I was finished, were it 5 pages or 7 (I rarely went beyond 7). If my paper was well-written and covered the essentials, I got high scores, no matter the prescribed "minimum length".
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