I had several teachers in both high school and college ask for writing assignments that had maximum word counts. e.g. "Write an explanation of the significance of the Treaty of Westphalia, in no more than 1500 words." Those writing assignments were, to me, more difficult than the ones that had minimum word counts, because they required you to get to all the major elements of the response in a minimum of space, leaving space for explanation and implication.

And, for what it's worth, writing in the "real world" is far more like this. Journalists, for example, rarely have minimum word count limits, but very often have maximum word counts.

[-]Martin Randall3mo*10

I also had this but typically the maximums were well above what was needed to complete the task. Claude 4 Sonnet spent 265 words explaining the significance of the Treaty of Westphalia when I asked. There is certainly more to be said than that, but it didn't need 1,500 words to complete the task, and neither did I as a kid doing equivalent assignments.

[-]Zalcsibalcsi3mo10

Firstly, 270 words would have been a typical High School limit for me, and thus that seems reasonable to me in this case.

However, choosing an appropriate word count depends on a lot of factors. There's the level: High School and Masters students are expected to demonstrate different breadths of knowledge. There's also the focus of the curriculum. (By this I mean, for example, that the detail in which given historical events are studied changes from country to country.) But most importantly, the purpose of the assignment. I expect that an assignment purely meant to test comprehension would be somewhat longer than an assignment testing the skill of synthesis itself, but shorter than one where conciseness is not itself the point.

Students asked to "Devise and document an experiment to measure Earth's surface gravity." (which I was asked to do in High School) will (should) be rated on understanding, experimental procedure, and perhaps critical thinking, but it seems counter-productive to overly restrict length, here. To return to the context of the post, this could be the basis of a later exercise in communication, focusing on clear, concise but accurate summarisation of the findings (but I'm, sadly, unaware of any school that teaches that).

[-]simon3y113

On the other hand, grading by word count, by incentivizing writing more, might lead to better outcomes through more practice.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hY86FhYysQ7dBg3d8/just-try-it-quantity-trumps-quality

It's probably not the most effective thing possible, but would the teachers actually be able to pull off a better method?

[-]RomanHauksson3y61

What are some others things that school teaches us about writing that aren't useful when we write in the "real world"? I know this depends on the type of writing: different techniques are useful for writing blog posts than books.

I'll start with another idea: it's fine to steal good wording. Sometimes inserting a quote or rewording a sentence isn't the best way to integrate an idea from another source into your writing, so you can just "steal" the wording that another writer uses and cite them.

[-]Viliam3y53

In fiction, the rule of thumb is "first, you have to unlearn everything you learned at school". But that's mostly because most of what you write at school is not fiction, so different rules apply.

Specifically the "introduction, body, conclusion" pattern makes fiction boring. It makes sense when you teach things (introduction = what you should focus on; conclusion = reminder of the important points), but for some reason teachers insist to use it also for stories like "what did you do during summer holidays", which is just wrong (assuming that the purpose of storytelling is to entertain the listeners, not make them memorize your holiday schedule).

In contrast, cool stories often start "in medias res".

[-]Dave92F13y45

the willingness to write a thousand words on a topic is not caused by understanding of that topic

No, but writing about a topic in a way that will make sense to a reader is a really effective way of causing the writer to learn about the topic.

Ever tried to write a book chapter or article about a topic you thought you knew well? I bet you found out you didn't know it as well as you thought - but had to learn to finish the work.