Disrespect, lies, deceit and...typeface

I normally strive for a pleasant, jovial but serious tone in my posts. If I can develop a joke or appropriate analogy, I’ll use it to lighten the mood and as a teaching moment.

This is not one of those posts.

Sooner or later, every year, I hear someone say something about making slight, seemingly imperceptible changes to the typeface to make an essay seem just long enough. Why use font size 12 when 13 will remove a line or two on every page? Why have inch margins when a tenth and an inch will shorten those lines?

Well, there's a lot of reasons why not.

For starters, there's the issues addressed in the post “Why The Page Count?” to explain the logic behind a page requirement. I'm not going to rehash those here. Ultimately, maintaining the typeface isn't a matter of assignment requirements: it's a matter of trust and respect.

In my own experience, my first year teaching consisted of 4 courses of about 20 students writing 15 typed pages each: 1200 total typed pages. The next year, 5 courses of 20 students writing 20 typed pages: 2000 total. Now I was just a graduate student, I wouldn’t be surprised if full-time professors, after a decade of teaching, have graded as many as 30,000 typed pages.

So I wonder what goes through student's heads when they triple space an essay, or set the margins on the left and right to be an inch and a quarter rather than just an inch. Thinking an instructor won't pick up on alterations to the typeface is like expecting a golfer to not know the difference between woods and irons.

When a student does this it shatters, literally breaks, whatever trust and confidence the instructor had in them. It is cheating. It is a student assuming the rules and expectations instructors establish don’t apply to them. I stress to my students that this is important not just because it’s an arbitrary standard, but because it keeps grading fair. Having a page formatted with 1.25 inch margins instead of 1 inch can increase the length of an essay by about 1/7th. Almost 15%. That is, in terms of grading, the difference between an A- and a C+. Should a project be accepted when it openly skirts around 15% of the work?

So what if someone forgets? I’m open to this possibility and I’ve seen it happen, but it usually depends on the circumstances of the situation. I had a student once who, after a great track record made one significant formatting mistake late in the semester after having done theretofore pristine work. We discussed the issue, the student revised, resubmitted, and all was well. Lesson learned.

Sometimes, though, even drumming and hammering the lesson won’t do. I’ve had students submit every essay incorrectly formatted. I reminded them in the feedback. I plead with them indirectly when addressing the class, and some still didn’t fix it. My approach in these situations was simple: if after weeks and months of my instruction and feedback, a student still has not figured out the need to change the typeface it really makes me wonder what they learned. Forgetfulness is one thing, but at this point, it’s negligence.

It upsets me when people suggest doing this so flippantly, but more so when people actually do it. Take the length specifications seriously. Skimming on the length of an essay is not too different from, say, ignoring test questions and expecting the instructor just to ignore them when grading. Most of all, though, this is disrespectful to peers: those who did the work, who filled their pages and followed directions. I rigidly teach formatting not because I’m obsessed with it, nor because students need to know MLA or APA or Chicago, but because it keeps grading fair. It keeps everyone’s three, five, or ten pages the same three, five, or ten pages. But insisting four pages is indeed five, is a deception, a lie, and a blatant act of disrespect to instructors and peers.

What "Page Count" Means

You might want to read “Why the Page Count?” before taking a look at this post.

Beware! Math logic below.

As both an instructor and student, I frequently hear some variation of “What constitutes three (or five or ten or however many) pages?” The answer has always been the same: Fill the last page, and the works cited page does not count.

On the one hand, clarification is important. After all, if assigned a five page essay and you have a dozen words on the fourth page and you have your works cited page, then do you have a five page essay? Well, I haven't met an English teacher who would accept that for a five page assignment. Why the rigid assignment requirements? 

One example. You are assigned a four page essay and you write and write and write until you have three pages and about a quarter of a page, so we can reasonably say your essay is three and a quarter pages long. At best this would round up to three and a half. At worst, it'll round down to three. Well, your essay is a half a page short. Half a page doesn't seem like much, right?

A half of a page for a four page assignment will come to 1/8 of the overall length: 12.5%. That's a lot. If we’re talking grades, that’s the difference between an A and a B-. If you were taking a math test with 40 questions and left five of them unanswered, you won't get full credit for them – so why should you on an essay? 

This still leaves an irksome question: what does fill mean? Just how much is that? Some instructors may specify a word count or range; others may want so many lines on the last page, or even inches. I try to shy away from word counts and other solid numbers, but I do tell my students the last page should have enough text to fill well over half of the space. If an essay falls right at or just over half a page, I won't reject it, but it's not going to get full credit. After all, it’s a writing class with certain expectations and falling short on requirements means not meeting those expectations.

The safe thing I've seen students do is write just up to the edge of the last line of the last required page or just go over. When I see this, I think it's overkill and I expect there to be a couple of inflated sentences. There may even be an odd expository paragraph somewhere. The best course of action would be to have an essay of a reasonable length and sufficiently detail, but if it's between a vacuous paragraph or a couple wordy sentences, it at least shows an effort to meet the requirements.

Why The Page Count?

One page. Single Spaced. Times New Roman. 10 is the smallest font size. Half inch margins.

This is what stood out to me in a writing prompt I got in grad school. It was bizarre. It amounted to about 1000 or so words, which, for an English graduate student expected to spew an analysis every time they’re asked a question, is hard. Why write three pages when I could write five, or fifteen?

I encountered a similar issue as an instructor. Each essay was required to have a minimum number of pages. No students confronted me about it, but I'm sure they wondered why they needed to have an exact number of pages filled, then I started noticing something. Those that turned in shorter essays, even if it was just a half page or so short, never wrote as detailed as they were supposed to. There were also those that were long enough or longer that still rambled, but I cannot remember a single essay that came beneath the minimum and did everything that it was supposed to. I've even assigned essays that were too short – a horde of 3 page essays that were never quite up to par while the few 4 pages ones were. I'm not going to fault my students for a mistake that I made, but it taught me an interesting lesson: required page lengths are anything but arbitrary.

An experienced instructor will have a strong enough grasp of the requirements and expectations. They know how much writing will meet those requirements. I had another professor who required a 15 page essay. 14 wouldn't cut it. 16 was too long. The assignment had other parameters, but most of all, could we, as grad students, write an essay that met the research, intellectual, and structural requirements and keep it all within 15 pages. It was hard for me. Just like the one page, single spaced one mentioned above.

Reflecting on both these assignments, I learned the same lessons: be detailed enough to meet the rigor and detail required, and be economical enough to say it as clearly and succinctly as possible.

There are other factors that go into it as well, especially as you move into the professional world. Maybe a magazine or newspaper won't take your 10 page treatise because they only have 30 pages that they can fill and have a dozen contributors that they have to put in there. But then why 30 pages? Why not 40? Costs of printing, distribution, and storage can lead to that number. Somewhere in every major publishing house there's an accountant who knows by heart how much every page costs at every phase of production, distribution, and marketing.

For every page length specification given, there are numerous factors – educational, practical, financial – that were taken into consideration before that number was given. If 2 pages will do, you'll be assigned 2 pages. If the work requires 5 pages of material, and the research and exploration that it entails, then you'll be assigned 5 pages.

As a last note, don't expect meeting, or exceeding, the page length of any assignment will guarantee a great score. I've seen six pages when five were assigned and thought “You could have cut this down.” You can always fill pages with building slippage or even repeat yourself. The point isn't to fill the pages, after all: it is to express yourself as well as you can, in enough detail, and to a sufficient extent. Rarely is the page length truly the minimum: it's an optimum.