Why call it a “requirement”?

The university I attended had very specific requirements for completing a Bachelor's degree in English: I had to take so many credits and certain classes as prerequisites to others. Among them was to take three literary history courses, each addressing a different historical period. For the sake of discussion, let's call one of these time periods Medieval Literature, and let's say I didn't take a Medieval Literature course. It doesn't matter if I didn't want to take it or couldn’t fit it into my schedule: I just never took it. And so, graduation time comes along. I've met every other requirement designated by the English Department for a Bachelor's degree except this one. I have the other historical periods, the theory courses, the research methods courses, the seminars, my general education courses, and all of it totaling the required number of credit hours needed for graduation.

So I go to fill out my forms for graduation, and this missing course comes up. What's the degree-granting department going to do? In a complex system, I've missed only one requirement among many. Will they then ignore this discrepancy and give me the degree?

Nope.

Why not? It's just one class.

Simple. I didn't do what I needed to do to earn it.*

Let's move closer to home then: the classroom assignments.

Most every assignment description has a list of requirements and many classes have a clause in the course syllabus stating all requirements must be met for an assignment to be accepted (and, depending on the class, an option to revise and resubmit). 

In composition courses, like those I teach, these requirements usually include:

• Length (word or page count)
• Research (number of type of sources) 
• Genre (the type of writing)
• Documentation (MLA, typeface, formatting). 

Depending on the assignment, there will be other requirements, like regarding thesis or organization. These aren’t sphinx like riddles to be deciphered to understand the true nature of the assignment: they’re clear statements of what the minimum expectations are.

Most students meet these requirements without too much trouble. So I'm flabbergasted when I receive essays that clearly miss these important requirements, and yes, sometimes a student has a hard time with a prompt or a genre, but when the assignment description says “3 page minimum” and 2 pages are turned in, or “MLA Format” and submissions are in Calibri 11 with inch and a quarter margins, or “Parenthetic Citations” and there are no citations whatsoever, the only assumption is the student has not paid attention to the requirements.

Requirement means it has to be done. Having so many pages or to have the essay written in a certain genre aren't just recommendations: they're requirements. They therefore, by definition, must be completed in order for the piece to be accepted. So, when assignments submissions don't meet the requirements, especially in college, they get 0’s.

That may sound heartless, but in a class with as few as a dozen or as many as a few hundred other students who did meet the assignment requirements, accepting something that didn't meet the requirements when everyone else did cheapens the effort of those that followed instructions. To accept two pages when three were required is to say the work and effort of those who turned in three pages was wasted. For me to do this would be to make me a hypocrite, and I'm not about to compromise my morals on behalf of someone who didn't take the class as seriously as the rest.

In short: If you want a degree, take the required classes. If you want to pass those classes, then finish the assignments as required.

*If anyone's interested, I did take courses that covered medieval literature for my Bachelor's and Master's degrees.

Make more than noise and smoke: Audience Specificity

“Specific Audience” is a term I throw around. This terminology came after I asked students about their audiences and they answered with things like “parents”,“doctors, “teachers”, and “the government.”

I've addressed this elsewhere (in “Write for a specific, powerful audience”), which I will quote here:

Picking an audience varies from genre to genre and purpose to purpose. Unfortunately, students frequently default to “parents,” “teachers,” and (this one makes me want to break things) anything that starts with “people who...” The problem with these audiences is it’s difficult, if not impossible, to address them as a whole because there will be so many different groups within the larger body. Writing for them can mean relying on logical fallacies and broad assumptions that reflect your own bias more than your understanding of the demographic you're trying to write to.

So broad, vague, audiences while trying to write argumentatively, is just spinning your wheels: you'll make some noise and some smoke, but in the end, it'll dissipate and you won't go anywhere.

I think the issue stems from two sources. The first is how arbitrary the concept is in a lot of English education and the second is popular media. As much as teachers pound it in, audience rarely ascends beyond something to mention, especially when it is closely tied to genre in literature studies, with genres written to appeal to broad audiences for the sake of market appeal and sales. This leads me to popular media, which acts the same way. Basically, it's easy to say “people who've watched Star Wars” because, in American culture, if not worldwide, this demographic will be large.

Authors and directors thrive off of this appeal to a wider audience, but, in education, there's the underlying, frequently unstated, fact the teacher is the audience and whatever a student writes, they need to tailor it to their teacher.

As it turns out, paying careful attention to and even seriously researching your audience can help shape what you're writing and helps you to better understand your topic and its implications, which is why audience is especially important in argumentation and persuasion. In the same post as the above quoted paragraph, I also said:

[A] specific audience (one that has a formal name, whether it's an individual or an organizational body) is a far better option.

Sometimes I elaborate on this by asking whether or not the audience has a physical mailing address. If, for example, you were to write to “parents,” what address would you put on the envelope? It's one thing to write for parents saying they should do something, but it's another thing to write to, for example, a major publication that has a large audience consisting of parents who share your concerns and interests.

Allow me to elaborate:

Vague Audience	Specific Audience
Parents	Parenting magazines, websites, and blogs
Teachers	A specific school, a school district, a parent-teacher association, a state's board of education.
Doctors	A hospital or clinic, a medical association
Government	State legislature, a senator or congressperson, a state managed organization
Employers	The Better Business Burearu, a manager, supervisor, or owner of a business.

Note that saying something like “a school district” is still indistinct because every school district has different priorities and standards: your essay that may be gladly accepted by one would be vehemently rejected by another.

Basically, if your audience is vague, adjust it to a more specific audience that has direct influence over the issue you are concerned with. This may seem redundant but it is significantly more realistic because, outside of the classroom, this is how you would do it and because it forces you to evaluate your audience and tailor your writing to them.

So, in short, specify your audience.

Don't sink too deep: Inappropriate Topics

When I first started teaching composition as a graduate student, some of my colleagues openly encouraged their students to write about sensitive, controversial issues: gun control, abortion, gay marriage, etc... Others forbade students from addressing these topics. It seems standard composition teachers will go one way or the other. On the surface, this can seem like the instructor's bias: they don't want to get a lot of essays that disagree with their own personal beliefs or opinions, or they have an agenda they want to push. While I'm sure there are instructors that do take such an approach, there are more practical reasons for restricting available topics.

For example, a student of mine once proposed writing about No Child Left Behind. Granted this isn't as sensitive a topic as those listed above, but it's still significant. I emailed the student saying if they were to write about No Child Left Behind, they would need to start by reading the law itself. I provided a link to the 670 page document.

And No Child Left Behind is just a simple example. Doing gun control, abortion, or gay marriage would require careful analysis of decades of legislation, court cases; and then accompanying sociological, psychological, biological, and chemical research, before diving into the world of ethics. To complicate matters, the myriad of opinion pieces on such topics found in newspapers, magazines, and blogs are highly subjective and therefore questionable, resulting in a continuation of Confirmation Bias on any side of the issue. So, properly addressing one of these topics would require hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of research; not all of it reliable, spanning decades of both primary and secondary sources, to be in a situation to authoritatively say something about it. Not many freshmen feel like putting that much effort into three pages.

When you consider the scope of research, this actually broadens inappropriate topics into less controversial areas, like childhood obesity and organic farming, and even more mundane, less controversial areas. Let me share one of my favorite examples. A colleague of mine said that a student of hers wanted to prove who Jack the Ripper was... in a freshman composition course. At the end of the semester but before the final essays were due, my colleague said she asked the student who Jack the Ripper was. The student hadn't come to a conclusion.

Personally, I’m not a criminologist, but I don't think there's a branch of anything that hasn't contributed something to the resolution of this Victorian murder mystery. Psychology, sociology, biology, chemistry, even literature has offered conjectures. There have been hundreds of books on the matter, and, I'm sure, many more articles, all of it ranging from the fanciful to the serious. To definitively prove the identity of Jack the Ripper in a matter of weeks would be to try and do what hundreds or thousands of experts have tried to do for more than a century.

Whether or not a topic is or is not appropriate should be determined by the structure of the class. Some topics, because of their scope and the research it would take to handle them, go far beyond the demands of a general education composition course. Education should be challenging and students should rise to that challenge, but it can be far too easy to get yourself in too deep.

I want my students to push and challenge themselves. I want them to branch out, learn, and grow; but my students are college undergraduates taking a course that is designed to give them writing tools for other courses. Many haven't settled on what to major in and are taking three or four courses in addition to mine, as well as their own social lives, jobs, and family obligations. I want to challenge my students; not set them up for failure.

Returning to my colleagues who encouraged students to write about controversial issues. After a year of teaching, pretty much all of them had changed their tune: they forbid their students from such topics. They hadn't undergone a moral or ethical change, but they had a better understanding of what their students could handle.

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.