In an article I found in the Eureka Review, one college writing professor decries the direct correlation he found between essay length and score on the new version of the SAT. Because many incoming freshmen view the SAT model as objectively “good writing” and because those who did well on the test are exactly those students who wrote high-scoring, wordy essays, an English comp teacher faces a classroom that is at least somewhat obsessed with the length of each essay.
“It’s exactly what we don’t want to teach our kids,” says Les Perelman, an MIT writing instructor. I agree.
I think we send mixed messages when we tell our students to avoid padding their papers with extra words in a system that not only rewards--but demands--sheer page length. Shouldn’t writing be genuinely inspired, sung by angels on high and simply transcribed by eager freshmen?
It’s a delicate balancing act. We ought to teach our students to become acquainted with their free and reflective inner writers, but we must also remember that part of our job is undeniably practical: our students will inevitably face demands of word length, and it’s our job to help them develop strategies for working within those boundaries.
Also, I understand that there’s a very obvious reason for the connection between word length and the success of a piece of writing. In most cases, good thinking requires a significant amount of verbage.
So, looking forward, I’m left with a big question: Is it possible to encourage writers to develop both an organic view on word count and the skills to knowledgably work within the construct of page requirements?
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