Students Want to Know Does Length Matter?
Heather Martin

Students Want to Know is a new feature that tackles questions commonly asked by students of their writing teachers. Our first question addresses the dreaded length requirement. We polled the Writing Program faculty, and here are some of their responses. Please email Heather Martin (hmartin1@du.edu) if you have a question for the column.

So does length matter?
Heres what our writing faculty had to say. . . .

I ask for a rough number of words (not pages: too ambiguous) for each piece of writing that I assign. The number reflects what I believe to be about the minimum required to make an argument deep enough to address adequately the question at hand. In my experience, students have found this guideline useful as it brings some clarity to my expectations, though I can certainly see how in some situations it may prove to be an artificial and not particularly useful constraint, insofar as the writer's job, ultimately, is to craft an argument suitable to the audience that they have imagined, and that argument doesn't necessarily include me. So I remain open to being persuaded that a given piece of student writing may be more effective if it contains fewer words than the rough minimum I've stipulated. And I don't penalize anyone for writing more than I've asked.
John Tiedemann

I am much less concerned with length than I am with development. I want students to work toward developing their ideas to support their points. The page limits I give are more for the students, ironically: it gives them something to hold on to, to shoot for. When I've tried to give lengths such as "as long as it takes," almost immediate mutiny ensues. A long paper is not always a better one. I think page lengths become part of some sort of badge of honor. The complaining is part bragging.
Kelli Custer

Absolutely, but not in the way students might initially expect. It depends on the situation, and in many ways, I encourage my students to think about length as a rhetorical constraint that will shape how their writing will unfold. For example, when students write letters to the Denver Post in my WRIT 1122 course, length matters a great deal, for they have to present their ideas in less than 300 words, a task that many find much more difficult than writing a five-page paper. Conversely, when I want students to develop their ideas more thoroughly by engaging with the ideas of other experts, I expect a level of depth in their writing that often requires lengthier papers. This doesnt mean I want students to pad their writing with extra fluff, but that being thoughtful, curious writers sometimes means taking time and space to elaborate more fully on their thinking.
Geoffrey Bateman

For my assignments, length does matter. I give quite a bit of thought to the rhetorical task and genre at hand and craft the minimum and maximum number of words accordingly. I provide a minimum number of words to ensure that students develop their ideas fully enough; I provide a maximum number of words to ensure that students learn to focus their ideas and express themselves clearly and concisely.
Linda Tate

Length does matter, but it's not the most important feature in my assessment. When I assign a piece of writing, I provide an expected page range because that is how long I expect the essay or report will need to be in order to complete the project successfully. If a student runs short but meets all requirements fully, then that's fine. Same goes for if they feel they need a bit more space, but I don't give extra credit for writing extra pages. The only time I really enforce length requirements is when we're working in a genre that has particular space or word-count restraints; in those cases, length becomes an important rhetorical consideration.
Jennifer Campbell

Does length matter? As a program, we have a twenty-page minimum length requirement for each quarters writing. For this reason, expanding the length of ones writing is important. But at the same time, we practice writing in short forms where it can be just as challenging to express ones thoughts succinctly. For example, I give a visual rhetoric assignment in which students create an Adbusters parody. An important satiric point must be made in just one page. Beginning writers tend to think that adding length is the hard part of writing, but I am reminded of Oscar Wildes comment concluding a letter he wrote: Forgive me for being so lengthy, as I did not have the time to be brief.
Kamila Kinyon

It depends on the genre, audience, and purpose. Definitely in certain genres like a letter to the editor, length is important. However, for most writing, length is much more flexible, and I think it's more about development of ideas than length. Like Kelli, for most of my assignments, I assign page limits more for the students' benefit than for my own requirement. I also tell students that the page length requirements are meant as a guide. If they are particularly precise writers, I tell them that it is possible to go under the page limit and that the reverse is also true if they need more space to develop their ideas fully. Definitely there are certain genres where lengthier pieces are inevitable. It takes a lot of space, for instance, to fully outline a methodology, describe, and then analyze an ethnography. Just to do all this, students are not going to write everything they need to in two to three pages. However, page length is not really an inherent feature of the genre. It is feasible that some students could write a much shorter ethnography than others, and this is totally fine.
Rebekah Shultz Colby

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