Student Writing

It is difficult to present your work concisely within a limited time-frame. People find it much easier to talk about their projects without regard to time, rambling on about minor points. This shows that the presentation is not rehearsed, and that the speaker has not considered what factors are essential to the presentation, and what factors are merely details.

This may seem surprising, but the amount of time that you are allotted, or page count for a written assignment, may be smaller in higher-level classes than what you experienced in lower-level classes. My observation is that students start college without communicating well. They often do not say much, and expect that you have the same frame of mind and can fill in all the details. So professors push them for more information, and may assign them to write, say, a 20 page paper. Over time, undergraduates learn to say a lot about a topic, a kind of "shotgun approach;" if they include copious amounts of writing, they are bound to hit the important ideas. By the time they are college seniors, they can fill a space well. They can easily write 20 page reports or talk for half an hour. But is it good? Why do they have to write 20 pages if it only contains 4 pages of important information? The next skill is to be able to say things concisely, to only include the important information, to go over the 20 pages and ask questions like

In my view, this is an important skill for graduate students to develop. Rather than give a minimum page length, they should be challenged to be brief. This is harder for students to understand -- you can clearly see if a paper meets a minimum page requirement, but how do you know if a short paper is comprehensive enough, detailed but relevant, and informative but not overly verbose? This comes through carefully thinking about your work and examining it for weaknesses. This is developed by practice! You can start by writing everything that you want to say, even if it is 20 pages. Then go over it, and reduce the amount of text. Re-arrange paragraphs, eliminate what you can, and re-state things more succinctly where possible.

Consider this text, with and without the strike-through words.
  In this modern world, the society in which we live today, where everyone has access to high-tech devices small enough to fit in a shirt pocket, we often take for granted the amazing, ever-changing technology that enriches our daily experience, technologies that our forefathers did not enjoy, improvements over paper (which is wasteful on trees and a bad idea in our green society), like the ubiquitous cell phone with Internet access that keeps us informed of the latest news, connects us with people from around the globe, and runs applications, also known simply as apps in the more shortened version of the word popular with this new on-line generation.
  The first version may get you going, but the edited version is much clearer!

As Kai A. Olsen wrote in "The Economics of International Conferences," Computer, June 2004, page 90:        
        "...few understand the difficulty in giving a short presentation. Winston Churchill
        once said that he needed 10 minutes to prepare a three-hour presentation, but 10
        hours to prepare a 10-minute one."

-Michael Weeks, Last update: October 21, 2011