Essay: Page count as academic assignment requirement

The current issue with academic texts, in my opinion, is with a number of people producing this sort of text without having something concrete to say. There are (too) many people for whose is writing academic text condition to do something else like gaining their degree or doing/continuing research. On the other hand, there are undoubtedly also very good texts and ideas which just get lost in quantity of other documents or which just don’t get enough attention due to the timing of publishing or many other reasons. The interconnecting issue is when good ideas get lost in its own length of word quantity. None of the mentioned situations are beneficial for anyone because they are consuming resources on the side of producers and also receivers. 

Writing long text have in my opinion historical context (several hundred years ago) when writing was not done by many people (in the context of the whole population) and it was reserved for a quite small group since it might be considered as “luxury” activity. Mentionable is to also think about the reachability of texts before information technology revolution (including typewriters and similar devices) when reproducing (academical, non-commercial, personal, etc.) texts were an arduous activity or done in bigger amounts based on (probably quite picky) selection. All of these aspects are might be the reason why we are thinking that the length of the text is a good metric to recognize good text.

Another and more concrete reason for defining text length as a metric for writing assignments might be a predictable amount of time which was spent on writing it. We cannot specify how long the other person spent on thinking about the topic but we can say that writing one page takes some specific amount of time and multiply it be required criteria. That’s happening, based on my observations, especially in an academic environment, where there is nonexisting other transparent specification of workload. It’s also possible to explain page length or similar criterium by the most comfortable way to do it for submitter authority and party also by assignee understanding of the task requirements. Are these concerns still up to date nowadays?

There is an ongoing fight for human attention coming from many directions primaries from entertainment and commercial sector represented by ads or various news feeds with personalized content which is mostly more attractive activity, easily consumed and partly addictive to watch or read. Therefore it is designed for being attractive and which brings popularity to platforms where it’s published. Compared to it we have writing methods that are defined with completely opposite parameters to be based on complexity, exhaustingly correctness and as measurable effort spent on it. I want to claim I have nothing against scientific texts without simplifications for masses but the whole point is in defining text length criteria to it.

A well-known writer said through his literary person “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1943) and I as a critical reader of scholarly literature can sign it immediately and emphasizing the fact that it’s visible when any text is not written according to that quote. The mentioned approach should be widely adopted by more academic writers and required by scholarly literature readers to stay focused and not waste everyone’s time to fulfill the criteria of the assignment. There are so many interesting articles and books to read so why to waste time on writing and reading empty sentences.