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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

Word count quotas are one of the worst ideas in education. In real life, quotas are practically non-existent and word limits are everywhere. Teaching students to pad their writing to fill a quota is teaching them bad writing. I suspect this is the reason so much academic writing is bad.

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I had a great English class in university where the professor agreed fully, and went so far as to really engage the class in doing the opposite. Instead of the 5-page minimum paper filled with flowery prose, it was the 2-page paper in which you concisely argue your point and leave it at that. A lot of the class really had difficulty adjusting their writing style to be concise and convincing instead of superfluously padding their point to meet a quota.

I'd love if this is something we saw more frequently in schools.

I had a fantastic high school English teacher who had word count maximums (that were generally pretty low: 500-1000 words) and graded based on how well-argued the point was. Really encouraged tight writing.

Coming out of high school, my writing was terrible. One of my history teachers assigned us ~10 page essays every other week. The class actually taught me pretty well to construct well-reason arguments with supporting research, but the only way I (or anyone else in the class) could produce that many pages that regularly was figuring out the _least_ efficient way to say what we meant.

My writing didn't really start to improve until college when I wrote some research reports for a semi-retired professor who took the time to wean me off my bad habits and write in a scientific style.

That reminds me of the Blaise Pascal[1] quote, "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."

[1] Maybe... https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/

Quotas really are everywhere in real life too, but, as you say, they are paired with word limits. Writing to a particular length is an important skill for professional writers. Novels, non-fiction books, short stories, magazine articles, newspaper articles, all have very specific (and fairly narrow) acceptable ranges for word count.

I found quotas that set a maximum number of words to actually be quite useful at teaching people how to construct and write compelling arguments.

In fact we were told recently at my company to keep every ppt deck under 4 pages if we can. No one has the time to read long presentations.

I've read that Bezos doesn't allow power point at all - only prose. Apparently no one has time for slides and oral presentations

I feel like slideshows exist to save the author time at the expense of the participants. Given that presentations always have more viewers than authors, this is rarely the right tradeoff.

Ppt decks in large companies usually aren't really slideshows. They are really meant to be printed / viewed on an individual screen, and is fundamentally enforcing a bullet point style and a lot of visual elements (charts, diagrams) as opposed to a long text only memo.

But over time people feel the need to stuff more things in them and you end up with 40 slides decks that defeat the purpose.

When I made PowerPoint presentations at work, I made it a point to have little-to-no text on the slides: mostly graphics, charts, diagrams, etc. that go along with what I'm saying.

It's no fun to exhaust my audience.

It depends on the job of the PowerPoint. If it's going to be saved and used by some people as a reference later it's usually better to have busy slides that contain the info that needs to be presented and just skip over the unnecessary verbosity by only highlighting key points.

If you're trying to pitch someone on why your redundant project shouldn't be canned then you should probably keep the slides simple and to the point and add in any extra stuff you need in the delivery of the presentation.

I tend to put what I'm saying under the slides of a power point in the notes section.

I would likely have separate detailed documentation (and a link to it in the PowerPoint) if that were relevant.

If something will be saved and used as a reference, it absolutely should not be a slide deck.

Write a 1-page brief. Make a tabloid-sized poster. Write a blog post. Save your bullet list in a plain text file somewhere. Scribble the main ideas on a chalkboard. Slide decks are the worst possible medium for use outside the context of a presentation (heck, they are a pretty terrible medium even for that context).

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