Times Newer Roman is a Font Designed To Make Your Essays Look Longer (theverge.com)

Chaim Gartenberg, writing for The Verge: Times Newer Roman, a font from internet marketing firm MSCHF (which you may remember from the Tabagotchi Chrome extension). Times Newer Roman looks a lot like the go-to academic font, but each character is subtly altered to be 5 to 10 percent wider, making your essays look longer without having to actually make them longer. According to Times Newer Roman's website, a 15-page, single-spaced document in 12 point type only requires 5,833 words, compared to 6,680 for the standard Times New Roman. (That's 847 words you don't need to write, which is more than twice the length of this post!)

Comments

"Academic" font?

[Anonymous Coward]

The academic fonts are Computer Modern.
Times New Roman is for people who use Microsoft software, not academics.

Re:"Academic" font?

[MightyYar]

I don't think THOSE kind of academics are the ones worried about padding out their essay on the ways in which various American artists view race and class as performed or performable identities.

Re:"Academic" font?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some academics still use Word Perfect to this day, you insenstive clod!

Re:"Academic" font?

[Anonymous Coward]

Word Perfect??? Luxury! We had to use an ASR 33 and line editor and learnt to like it!

Re:"Academic" font?

[petermgreen]

Depends which corner of academia you are in. Some fields almost everyone used LaTeX, some fields almost everyone uses Word (with third party extensions), some fields there is a mixture.

Re:"Academic" font?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Some fields almost everyone used LaTeX, some fields almost everyone uses Word (with third party extensions), some fields there is a mixture.

In the fields I know, most academics use grad students to write their papers.

Re:"Academic" font?

[hey!]

You had a paper tape reader? Luxury! We used to live a wastepaper bin in the IPC and had comptuer dots dumped on us every morning, which we ate for breakfast -- if we were lucky.

Re:"Academic" font?

[Anonymous Coward]

Please light yourself on fire as soon as possible.

Re:"Academic" font?

[PopeRatzo]

trump is anything but lazy...

I wrote my PhD thesis in Nota Bene, which was very good word processor for DOS. I later switched to LaTeX, because university publishers liked all that postscript shit, and I felt kind of cool being the only one in the English Department who used LaTeX. Plus, I could run it on any of the weak-ass computers the department would give me before I got to be tenure-track. It made it a little complicated to collaborate with my colleagues, but by the time that was an issue, I had other options. I did have several students who submitted graduate-level work in LaTeX though, and I insisted on it for masters or PhD theses.

Re:"Academic" font?

[Anonymous Coward]

High-school objective: make short essay look long.
Undergrad objective: write essay.
Postgrad objective: squeeze 12-page paper into 8-page conference page limit.

Re:"Academic" font?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a lecturer once who did his slides like that (not sure if it was word-perfect, but it was certainly some pre-historic method that produced a very, umm, "retro" look).

Whatever: it was maths, he knew his stuff, and the his lectures were pretty good really.

Re:"Academic" font?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to use slide rules and thick, heavy books......

Which I carted to and from school uphill both ways in 10 feet of snow with a pack of wolves chasing me the entire time.

Re:"Academic" font?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I don't like LaTeX (and so will use troff, but then I only write essays when I want to; I don't have to) also because I don't particularly like computer modern, but LaTeX can use other fonts too. Nobody does because, why? (I know why I would, but then I also know why I don't use LaTeX: troff is sufficient for my needs and lots smaller and less bitmap-y to boot.)

The bunch that use word tend to be the ones steeped in "critical theory", claiming they're "post fact", and so on.

Those people are already quite versed in hiding that they have nothing to say by using as many words as possible (and are getting rightly mocked for that, e.g. through the "new real peer review" twitter account), but I suppose yet another tool in that toolbox could help strengthen their standing among their academic peers, such as it is.

Though the fix for this cheating-by-font is easy enough: Change the requirement from pages to words. Gauging wordcounts from paper isn't particularly difficult, I remember being taught how to do it back in highschool. Besides, there are many fonts wider than times new roman that look reasonably like it already available. This gimmick really isn't all that special, but hey, you can get a stir out of it anyway.

And the fields where they use a mixture? That's actually quite interesting from a typographical standpoint. LaTeX is, for all its faults, a very good typesetter. microsoft[r][tm][x][y][z] word[r][tm][x][y][z] is not, it produces visibly inferior type. Of course, asking your browser to print a page is even worse than that, any browser, even after all these years of making browsers, but there are many many options that produce better type than word.

Re:"Academic" font?

[Anonymous Coward]

The people worried about padding out essays are in fields where they are judged by the number of pages rather than the content.

You would think it only happened in literature studies but unfortunately you will find plenty of this in STEM.
Unfortunately the font doesn't work if lines of code is the metric. Can we get one where a linefeed only is half height?

Re:"Academic" font?

[Askmum]

High-school objective: make short essay look long.

Exactly. That someone, idk 40 years after the invention of WYSIWYG editors and proportional fonts, is writing an article about this must mean that there really is nothing to report. Even I was looking at which font was the best to make my essays longer, and I've played with CP/M
But hey, it's The Verge. The people that tell you to put an extra layer of cooling paste on your CPU when your cooler already has the stuff preapplied, or the people that tell you to put your PSU in the correct way or otherwise it will make a short-circuit with the case (and then screws it on with metal screws).

Re:"Academic" font?

[Chas]

Right. Lines of code? Use a regular font.

Someone wants a 10,000 word essay? You give them 10,000 words.

But if someone wants a 20 page report from you, and you nail it in 16 pages, why waste time padding out sentences and belaboring your points with extra words? Flip to the wider font, fiddle your margins slightly. BOOM. 20 pages.

Re:"Academic" font?

[Cederic]

Unfortunately the font doesn't work if lines of code is the metric

Please report any such academic fields to the examination boards for incompetence, as lines of code is never a fucking metric.

A good software engineer can take 1000 shit lines of code and turn them into 20. A great one will take those 20 and turn them into 50.

I doubt the analysis has been done to an adequate level to correctly predict the output in lines of code to a degree sufficient for inclusion in grading for even simple problems.

Re:"Academic" font?

[MightyYar]

I agree there is "plenty of this" in STEM, but at least it's not all of it. Granted, I've been out of school for 20 years, but back then the main culprits were liberal arts classes. I don't remember padding out lab reports, code was mostly judged by whether or not it worked, and my endless math/physics/materials/fluids/etc classes were almost universally scored based on the correct answer, with consolation points for work shown.

On the other hand, I wrote total BS papers in English for books that I only skimmed (first chapter, last chapter, first and last paragraph of every chapter). Played with margins, font, spacing... you name it. Desktop publishing may have been only a few years old but I took full advantage :)

Re:"Academic" font?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be silly. "Times New Roman" is simply a font designed for The Times newspaper. It looks ugly because the letters have been narrowed and the x-height has been oversized for the purpose of fitting the most letters and words on a page - that's the opposite of what the new font is attempting to.

Re:"Academic" font?

[hawk]

It generally takes a week of work to get a dissertation into format when the dissertation nazis in the graduate office are done with it.

I used LyX to write LaTeX, and my time was well under 15 minutes--**including** the call over something that they got backwards, and "correcting" before the call and fixing after the call. I had to manually insert a pagebreak somewhere due to the rules on figures; that was really about it.

It helped that there was an ISU thesis package for LaTeX . . .

And near the deadline, I got stranded for a couple of days when my transmission failed with only an older version of the dissertation on my laptop, but with the latest markup from my committee.

So I made a copy to edit, edited away, took a diff, and patched the master when I got back . . .

hawk

Re: "Academic" font?

[jabuzz]

In which case they can just use the "Make it Fit" expert make have that do all the work fiddling with font size, margins and kine spacing to pad out their work to what ever the desired page count is. It more than 20 years later and Microsoft Word still has not got the same feature, but did aquire a stupid ribbon.

Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

When will our "educators" finally grade papers based on content covered rather than some arbitrary word/paragraph/page length. Are they not able to judge whether a topic has been sufficiently covered by reading comprehension?

Re: Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

Work was hard so we quit.

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you show them how, Mr. Expert?

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure it's educators who really want to grade papers that way. I taught an intro-level college class and assigned a paper as a class project. I told the students that I was grading on content and described those expectations. I didn't assign a page limit and told them they needed to cover their topic thoroughly without adding fluff. Students didn't like the expectation of a brief but thorough paper and I received a lot of push back. Students would say things like "I understand, but how long does it really need to be?", indicating they wanted a page or word length guideline. I assume they got this expectation in high school. I explained that outside of academia, people want thorough but brief reports and I was preparing them for the real world. They didn't want to accept my explanation. I'm not sure it's educators who want these limits. I think students want them so they know the minimum amount of work they have to do.

Re:Absurd

[mark-t]

I imagine it has to do with the objectivity of the metric, and ensuring that what the author of the paper has chosen to write about is sufficiently broad and complex enough that a paper of that length will not feel repetitious, while at the same time ensuring that the paper remains focused enough in its intent to not be much longer than the target length.

Re:Absurd

[mark-t]

Did you give them the subject they were to write about?

Because if not, I'm sure some smart-ass student could hand in a half page paper that as thoroughly covered the topic as is humanly possible simply because it's not interesting enough to most people to have had that much information published about it yet.

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

The topic was to discuss the meteorological processes and societal impacts of a significant weather event. I allowed the students to pick an event of their choosing, but I required that I approve the specific event they chose. If I didn't there was enough reference material for a particular event, I rejected the event and told them to pick a different one. I addressed your concern in that manner. I then instructed them to prepare an outline of their topic and meet with me to go over it. I did that to make sure they weren't skipping things they should write about or adding extraneous information that didn't belong.

I also set a deadline for students to turn in a draft paper to me. They got full credit for the draft so long as they made an honest effort to turn in a legitimate draft, even if it was deeply flawed. As long as they didn't turn in something like a one paragraph paper, I gave them credit. I gave feedback on each of the drafts indicating where I thought the content was lacking, where there was fluff, or where they might have provided too much detail. In some cases, I suggested additional references or even created figures for students.

I did quite a bit of work to provide guidance to students about the content of their papers and what I expected. I knew for many of the students, they might not have been given an assignment like that before. That's why I provided so much guidance, and I made that clear from the beginning that I planned to do so. Despite that, students were unhappy that I didn't assign a word/page limit.

Re:Absurd

[goose-incarnated]

When will our "educators" finally grade papers based on content covered rather than some arbitrary word/paragraph/page length. Are they not able to judge whether a topic has been sufficiently covered by reading comprehension?

The length given is a maximum, and if you want to exceed it go ahead but you better be really sure that the content you're adding is both relevant and necessary.

My theses lengths were specified in word-counts, but I seriously doubt that the prof actually ran a wordcount on it. The word-count served as a guide as to how much detail and content they expected. Should I have made a much more significant contribution than expected, then the word-count matters not at all.

If, OTOH, your thesis is not remarkably new and/or thorough, then the wordcount should serve as a warning to the you that you may have misjudged what was expected of you. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you made a groundbreaking discovery; after all, Einstein's Phd was only 22 pages long.

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

"Thorough but brief" is always subjective and will never, ever be otherwise. Everyone's grade was going to be arbitrary, or more to the point, it was going to depend on how good they were at reading your mind. No wonder there was pushback!

Did you at least provide some examples of some papers that happened to fit your idea of "thorough but brief?" That would actually go a long way toward fixing the problem. They could even have a hell of a spread in length, but as long as they provided some estimates of what you consider to be thorough, and also what you consider to be brief, at least the students would have a chance of correctly conforming to your mysterious specification.

But absent examples, I don't know what I would have done, had I been your student. Maybe I would have pushed back, but maybe I would have just took a wild shot and hoped that I had correctly read your mind. If I got an A, I wouldn't even be happy; I'd just be relieved that I had dodged a totally random, unfair bullet. OTOH if I got a bad grade then our relationship would have been permanently damaged and I would talk shit about you behind your back for as long as we're both at the school. You would definitely be checking your chair for thumbtacks for the rest of the year.

Re: Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

Your unwillingness to cite a page length is unreasonable. You offer no meaningfully useful definition of "thorough", or "brief", so of course the students have anxiety. If my subordinates ask me a.clarifying question, in the real world I tell them what I expect the result to be, and to make.sure that I haven't missed anything. Their job is to make sure I am right when I talk upstairs, not to tell me I'm right to mine.

You could easily have stated that a student once submitted a paper of X pages on event Y and got an A, and then tell them they can't also write about Y so as not to get twenty papers on it.

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

I discussed the process more at https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12636764&cid=57344238. They didn't have to read my mind at all. I gave specific comments to the students along the way, when I reviewed their outlines and again when I reviewed their drafts. Length wasn't a consideration, though I occasionally told them to remove a section or trim fluff out of the paper. They were graded on whether they had addressed the specific comments about their drafts. That's not arbitrary when they have specific comments to address and then are graded on that.

Most of the students did quite well on the papers, actually. The lowest grades went to students who simply didn't make an effort and those who didn't make an attempt to address the comments I made about their drafts.

I agree that something totally open ended would have been a poor assignment. I took steps to make sure the assignment wasn't ambiguous. I gave them specific instructions and feedback about their individual papers, basically anything other than directly giving a length requirement. They got full credit for the outline and the draft so long as they made anything that resembled an honest effort, even if they completely missed what I expected.

Still think it's totally unfair?

Re: Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on the posts I think you've made, you'll view anything that doesn't include a specific length guideline (e.g., write an eight page paper) as unreasonable. Your position isn't reasonable and it's inconsistent even with other academic expectations. For example, there's no length guideline on a thesis or dissertation. If you don't provide enough content, your committee will review your work unfavorably. If you add lots of fluff and extraneous content, your committee also won't view that favorably. Are dissertations and theses inherently unfair as well?

I encouraged students to insert pictures inline to make the paper more readable. That alone renders any length guideline meaningless, especially because figures can be expanded or shrunk to meet the goals of the students. I suggested that a paper that was two or three pages was too brief, but that a paper towards 15 or 20 pages would have been unnecessarily long. I just didn't put a specific number on it.

Thorough means they address all the topics on their outline, which I approved. Brief was explained as not adding fluff. I gave them an example along the lines of, if they're writing about a tornado event, they should discuss the conditions for their specific event but they don't need to provide general meteorological background on how tornadoes form. Basically anything that's not specific to their event is unnecessary.

In the real world, you're not looking for your employees to write a certain number of words or paragraphs. Unless you're a publisher where space matters, you'd be a lousy supervisor. Instead, you care that they give you the information you need and that it's accurate. You also don't want them to waste your time on stuff that doesn't matter.

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

If these students needed so much handholding that you had to review an outline and a draft, then of course they couldn't deal with an arbitrary length assignment. None of my college classes (aside from major projects, theses, etc.) wanted anything but a finished product; if you needed help, you had office hours and the writing center to work with. Actually, I think the last time I was required to turn in a draft was 7th grade. By Senior year English class, we didn't even have assigned essay topics. So of course by then we could handle not having a required length (and once you tuned in to the teacher's preferred style, it was easy to churn out a one-page paper in no time that got full credit).

But it sounds like your students were still at middle school level, if that. At that level, they need more structure, so you have to tell them three pages or five pages or three to five pages or whatever the most you want to have to read is and let them fudge things to meet that number. You give them a requirement that you don't really expect them to meet and they turn in something that doesn't really meet the requirement but looks like it does. That's how you prepare them for the real world.

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

The grading of any paper is somewhat subjective. Unless you're looking for a specific correct answer, it's subjective. The grading of any essay is subjective.

At no point were the students graded on length. They were graded on addressing all of the points in the outline, which they turned in and got approved. That's what being thorough means. Because I reviewed all of their outlines, they were given a specific definition of what that means.

Brevity meant providing information specific to that event, rather than inflating the paper by providing unrelated information or content related to general meteorological processes rather than their event. An example is that you don't need to tell me generally how a tornado forms, just what specifically happened in their event.

It would have been unreasonable to have a length requirement that isn't disclosed to students. They were given guidance along the lines of that the paper should be at least a few pages long, but 15 or 20 pages is almost certainly too long. One would interpret that to be a range of 5-15 pages or so. I strongly encouraged them to be toward the lower bound of that rather than the upper bound, emphasizing brevity. I gave them guidance about length, just not a specific target like eight pages. I specified that it should be single spaced. I asked them to insert pictures inline, and required them to number each one and reference it in the text. But if a paper happened to be 4.5 pages long rather than a full five pages, I wouldn't have taken any points off on the basis of length. If they fully addressed all of the topics, they could have received a perfect score.

I didn't want students to think they had to add fluff to make a paper five pages if they had written a quality 4.5 pages and addressed everything. Educators shouldn't demand eight pages and give a student a poor grade for writing a compelling paper that's only 7.5 pages. That's silly. I consider it a bit like refusing to give a student any credit for an assignment that's due at midnight, turned in at 12:03 AM, and is of high quality.

I didn't include specific details in previous posts to keep my comments relatively brief. To be clear, about the only thing I didn't do is put a specific number on it, such as eight pages. I actually addressed all of this in a lengthy document that was distributed at the start of the semester.

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

My son is in fairly challenging high school classes, and the teachers there have instituted a good method: they specify a maximum word count, and set out specific objectives for what the paper needs to contain. No minimum word count is given.

In middle school my son used to just do stream-of-consciousness writing until exceeding the word count minimum, but to get a good grade now he finds he has to really organize his thoughts and work through multiple drafts in order to deliver the required content concisely enough to fit in the limit. If he doesn't work at it, he finds it just isn't possible to include all the material without exceeding the word count.

This probably only works for students who want to get a good grade.

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd definitely reconsider some aspects of that assignment before doing it again. This was a class for non-majors, so those steps were also to catch if they misunderstood something about the science. This was an online class. I gave students the opportunity to meet with me in person or via Google Hangouts.

I think students have different expectations about how much work they should do for an online class versus a traditional classroom setting. I recorded lectures that were roughly half the length of what I'd do in a traditional classroom, with the expectation that students might go back and watch parts of the videos more than once if needed. I had students who considered it excessive that they should have to watch 2-3 short lectures (20-30 minutes each) per week. I tried to make the overall workload approximately equal to teaching in a typical classroom setting, but they perceived it as being more work.

I think these students were capable of being better and would have done better if it wasn't an online course. I think that influenced the effort they made during the semester, and they got less out of the class as a result. I had lots of issues with students who didn't keep up with the workload. It's part of the reason why DFW rates are so high for online classes.

I think you're right that I have to be a bit more explicit in my length guidance and narrow it down somewhat. One of my objectives was to get the students to avoid adding fluff and actually give me a shorter paper. One could suggest giving a lower approximate range for paper lengths, but I worried that it would result in less content.

Overall, teaching an online class wasn't an enjoyable experience for me. I haven't encountered this level of issues in a traditional classroom setting, which I much prefer. I think the apparent ineptitude of my students mostly reflects their perceptions of the effort that should be required for an online class.

Re: Absurd

[sysrammer]

Agreed. In the business world, f'rinstance, I've *never* been given a limit on how many pages my report must be. Frankly, I would probably laugh. Though I've found occasionally that laughing at stuff like that is NSFW.

Re:Absurd

[sysrammer]

Ha! I think the key takeaway is the final statements: "You give them a requirement that you don't really expect them to meet and they turn in something that doesn't really meet the requirement but looks like it does. That's how you prepare them for the real world."

Yep. This is how 50-75% of business managers manage. Is academia similar? I imagine so, (enter your own MBA joke here).

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

"Still think it's totally unfair?"

Of course s/he does. Reality today is based on unfounded assumptions.

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

That's an interesting idea. Thanks! It probably goes a long way toward eliminating fluff and other ways of inflating paper length.

I'll probably be teaching a class again in the spring, thankfully in a classroom setting rather than online. I don't plan on having a semester paper like that, but probably some shorter writing assignments. The assignments would be opinion questions about current issues in weather and climate. I've done something like this previously, where I ask their opinion and ask them to cite 2-3 sources, which can be as simple as online news articles from credible sites. Giving very specific objectives and putting a word length limit would be helpful in forcing students to organize their thoughts, so I may well use your idea.

I'm also thinking that for the first writing assignment of the semester that it'll effectively be a participation grade. If they make an honest effort and meet some minimum requirements (more than 2-3 sentences, actually citing the minimum number of sources) that they'll get full credit if the writing is otherwise lacking. I'll also tell them what their score would be based on my grading expectations for the rest of the semester and give specific feedback. That way, they learn my expectations early on without penalty to their grade. Otherwise, it seems like I have to go easier on the grading at the start of the semester or give out a bunch of low grades at the start, neither of which is especially helpful. They get one free assignment to learn my expectations, and everything else will be graded the same way throughout the semester.

Thanks for the advice. I suspect I'll be using that idea next semester.

Re:Absurd

[mark-t]

As long as they didn't turn in something like a one paragraph paper, I gave them credit.

But that's where the problem is... you implicitly imposed a minimum length on the students without actually telling them what it was. How, reasonably, should a student know what expectations are upon them unless they are told in quantitatively measurable terms?

In the real world, you don't need such quantitative descriptors because people hopefully have enough experience by then to gain an intuitive understanding of how much or how little they need to write to convey their position adequately, but while one is learning, they don't necessarily yet have the background to intuitively recognize it.

Developing an intuition for how much or how little you need to write to convey your point across is something you can only learn by trying, and probably failing a lot along the way... and even if they don't do well in the draft, that doesn't mean they aren't learning something from it.

It's pretty cool that you're getting students to do that though... I wouldn't give in on giving them a page count or paragraph count, even if they ask for one... just help them develop that intuition that you seem to realize that they are going to need in the real world, and make it explicitly clear that's what you are trying to do.

Re:Absurd

[mark-t]

I consider it a bit like refusing to give a student any credit for an assignment that's due at midnight, turned in at 12:03 AM, and is of high quality.

I remember one professor in the computer science faculty where I studied that had a policy like that. Assignments were due at the beginning of the class on the due date, and after class started, the door was closed and locked. He had a zero tolerance for lateness, and any more than two unexcused absences were grounds for failing the course. I had this professor for multiple clases, usually at least one each semester, and one time I had him in two.

In the first class I had with him, I thought he was kind of an asshole, to be honest.... but as I had more courses with him, I ended up respecting him more than any other professor I had. He was strict, but you couldn't take his classes and possibly even pass without actually really learning some serious shit.

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

Your thorough but brief essays remind me of instructions I had to follow once for a maintenance I had to perform when I was in the Navy, which was "be gentle but firm when removing the connections".

I laughed at that requirement, just as I laugh at yours.

Re:Absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they are really just fancy CALCULATORS and don't have any real computing/thinking abilities.

Re:Absurd

[serviscope_minor]

How, reasonably, should a student know what expectations are upon them unless they are told in quantitatively measurable terms?

Because the students are ideally intelligent and not massive pedants who exist only to nitpick everything to the final degree. Everyone needs to deal in a world where nothing is specified completely. If the students can't cope, then they're probably not up to the task of passing.

They probably specified the paper size, margins, font size and maybe even line spacing. How are the students supposed to know that the kerning isn't a free for all? How can they know that if they submit the requisite 8 pages with only 3 words per line then they'll fail???

Re:Absurd

[djinn6]

Correlation does not equal causation. Is he good because he had that policy, or in spite of it?

I've had very good professors who were quite lax with assignments. Though my definition of "very good" refers to how much I learned from them, not how many other students they failed.

Re: Absurd

[Cederic]

I have. Sometimes self-imposed.

E.g. for some audiences the first two pages must contain everything relevant; the rest may be needed as supporting material but assume it'll never get read.

For many audiences they need something short enough to go through in a fixed amount of time. So a 40 page document is pointless if you need to get through the material in 30 minutes.

Sure, you can write a 200 page report and just present a 12 page summary. But reality is that many times in a business context your time is better spent writing a 12 page report in the first place. People just wont read a book.

That doesn't mean that there aren't occasions where a long and detailed report is needed. I'd hate the Air Accident Investigation Board to only produce 4 sentence summaries. "It crashed. People died. We blame the wing manufacturer."

Re:Absurd

[Cederic]

specify a maximum word count, and set out specific objectives for what the paper needs to contain

That was the standard approach in the early 90s when I did my degree.

Most lecturers would also add some 'ease of reading' measures such as font size and spacing, but those were exactly that, and fuck all to do with being able to concisely demonstrate an understanding of the subject.

Re:Absurd

[mark-t]

I wasn't suggesting a causal relationship. I thought he was a good professor despite having policies that definitely antagonized a lot of students. My point was only that such policies are not necessarily counterproductive to being an effective teacher.

Re:Absurd

[Rhacman]

The page length is the shortest document that can clearly explain $SUBJECT to $AUDIENCE with sufficient citations and references to back statements to the source material(s).

The only time I ever recall hearing of a page count in college was as a warning that if your paper was getting that long you were probably off in the weeds.

Re:Absurd

[mark-t]

You misunderstand my point... the teacher here was evidently trying to help the students gain an intuitive understanding of how much work they reasonably needed to do... and that's a laudable goal. However, that intuition is often only gained by experience... if they haven't yet had sufficient experience testing that out, how can it possibly be expected they would have it?

Or do you mean by "intelligent" that they are somehow gifted savants that just somehow always know what the right amount to say about a subject is without any prior real exposure to doing it?

But it looks bigger

[chispito]

I followed TFA and the font looks like the author simply increased the size by half a point. If you are trying to make your paper seem longer, it will probably sound like you are trying ot make your paper seem longer.

This will not help, especially if the person grading is paying attention. So what if they accuse you of changing the margins or spacing instead of identifying the actual isssue? You were most likely given a list of acceptable fonts, and Times I'm Lazy was not on that list.

Re:But it looks bigger

[bluefoxlucid]

Making your paper longer is stupid anyway. The discovery of the Double Helix was published in a two-page article. There are journals now with maximum length limits and restrictions on how many figures and tables you can include, so either stfu and say something useful or just stfu.

Adam Smith wrote a five-paragraph essay in fifty pages.

Re:But it looks bigger

[Anonymous Coward]

Adam Smith wrote a five-paragraph essay in fifty pages.

Who is Adam Smith and what was his essay about?

Re:But it looks bigger

[Anonymous Coward]

Making your paper longer is stupid anyway.

In high school and collage I was require to submit papers with a minimum page length. So, you think I was stupid to follow those rules? I wish I'd known. Padding out my paper was hard work. I'd figured these days, teachers go by word count, because there are lots of ways to stretch out things.

After grad school, I went off into science and I'm an author on many papers and countless proposals. I think nearly every one of them we had to work to remove as much text as possible.

Re:But it looks bigger

[HornWumpus]

It's funny to hear a Marxist criticize Smith for being long winded. Just how unaware are they?

Re:But it looks bigger

[thegarbz]

I have a dual degree in Business and Engineering. I was always fascinated by the concept that Business Management assignments had a minimum word count, and engineering assignments had a maximum.

It kind of fundamentally explains the differences between:
Management: Bullshit until the bull can shit no more.
STEM: If you can't explain it in a 1 liner then you haven't found the best solution.

Re:But it looks bigger

[Anubis IV]

Use what's given to you well. Padding papers wastes everyone's time and is stupid. Not being able to intelligently fill space that's been given to you is stupid too.

When I was serving as a teaching assistant in grad school, each semester a student would inevitably ask how many pages their essay would need to fill of the five (double-spaced) pages we had asked them to provide. I'd always tell them that their perspective was backwards: the problem they should be having was in figuring out what they needed to cut to squeeze their arguments down to five pages. We had equipped them with a number of logical tools and the topics we were giving them were rich with nuance and avenues to explore. Even a few moments of cursory thought should have left them overflowing with ideas that would need to be cut before their thoughts could fit in five pages. If they hadn't even given the topic enough thought to fill five pages, it was doubtful they had given it enough thought to warrant a decent grade.

Then I'd sigh loudly and say, "...but if you still need some encouragement, I'll deduct additional points if you drop under four pages", simply because that was a requirement the professors had put on us.

Students who pad their paper's length—either by using a font to make their paper appear longer or by using inane speech that adds nothing of value—are missing the point and are cheating themselves out of hundreds of words that their peers will be putting to good use.

Re:But it looks bigger

[im_thatoneguy]

Yeah there is a very very obvious change in the appearance of the font. The better approach is to just adjust your kerning by 5%. The characters are precisely identical and it's still longer.

Re:But it looks bigger

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an MBA but don't recall a single assignment with a minimum word count. Probably depends on who your professor is.

Re:But it looks bigger

[Anonymous Coward]

If someone gave me five pages of arguments for a simple topic, I wouldn't even bother to read.
I really don't care for the "rich nuances."

While I agree that someone can fill a page without saying anything, this should not be encouraged. Quite often, thoughts and concepts can be expressed briefly and straight to the point.

Re:But it looks bigger

[Cederic]

My degree is from a business school, but it's a BSc and not a BA.

Perhaps that's why we have word maximums, and never minimums. Who the fuck needs a minimum at even undergrad level?

Re:But it looks bigger

[bluefoxlucid]

Not being able to intelligently fill space that's been given to you is stupid too.

Maybe you should stick to one concise topic and discuss it well instead of describing several topics at length.

I have a paper on structural wage--on the impacts of minimum wage on the labor force size and distribution of income, notably considering minimum and median wage each as a percentage of the per-capita gross national income and minimum wage in terms of percentage of median wage.

In this paper, I touch briefly on Malthus to describe employment as the gateway to abundance, thus suggesting that wages as a smaller percentage of GNI/C expands our labor force while wages as a larger percentage of GNI/C slows labor force growth rather than leading to high unemployment. A shock of sudden wage increases can shrink the labor force faster than its natural growth rate, increasing unemployment; carry out that more jobs are becoming available and that there isn't as much of a labor shortage and you remove the driving force of labor force growth, concentrating wealth into fewer hands. Smaller GDP, more income per capita, higher standard of living.

I could write an entire separate paper on labor force trends and what mechanisms drive the labor force short and long term. Structural wage is part of structural wealth theory, which includes a Universal Dividend; I could write an enormous paper on the hypothetical American Citizen's Dividend implementation, along with the implications (taxes continuously fall, recessions no longer occur, and the sudden shock of excess economic efficiency drives a sudden labor force shortage, thus requiring a dramatic cut in weekly working hours to slow per-capita productivity and raise unemployment back to something not prone to trigger hyperinflation).

I could also take a paper on minimum wage trends and expand it to include 6 different topics, bloating it up into a massive tome to add space while I try to pretend I'm not off-topic because the economics are all related.

Get your point across clearly, completely, and concisely. Don't ramble about other shit to fill space.

Re:But it looks bigger

[Anubis IV]

Maybe you should stick to one concise topic and discuss it well instead of describing several topics at length.

[...]

Get your point across clearly, completely, and concisely. Don't ramble about other shit to fill space.

Agreed! As I started my comment by saying, padding papers is a waste of everyone’s time. My point, however, was that you should have given the topic sufficient thought to have a need to edit yourself for concision. If you haven’t even given it that much thought, it’s likely that you aren’t saying something worthwhile in the first place, regardless of whether you write three paragraphs or three pages in the end.

Re:But it looks bigger

[bluefoxlucid]

Paul Samuelson's landmark paper on the efficient provision of public goods was only three pages in the 1954 Review of Economics and Statistics. If someone tells you to fill five and you have a landmark argument in three, "Not being able to intelligently fill the space given to you" is just being too smart to ramble for five pages about a three-page topic. You lose points, but you gain a Nobel prize.

You can't base on the premise that maybe you end up with three paragraphs, but you haven't thought enough if you didn't write thirty pages first. Arbitrary minimum lengths are pointless.

The shortest scientific thesis ever published was five characters long. It had a massive impact, to the point of immediately shifting an entire nation's direction of scientific study.

Re:But it looks bigger

[Anubis IV]

I’m clearly failing to communicate here, since I don’t disagree with anything you’re arguing, yet it’s clear that you think you’re arguing against what I’m saying. My saying that people should be able to intelligently fill the space they’re given doesn’t mean that I’m suggesting they should pontificate at length when fewer words would serve them better.

I’m not advocating the padding of papers, “intelligently” or otherwise. I’m talking about a perspective issue. Samuelson could have written a novel-length report had he wanted to. Einstein too, of course. They obviously didn’t need to, but their concise points carry so much weight because they were so well thought out. The students asking how little space they needed to fill weren’t thinking that way. THAT was the underlying problem I was addressing. Their lack of words on a page was evidence of that problem, but it wasn’t a problem unto itself.

Re:But it looks bigger

[bluefoxlucid]

Well maybe we shouldn't assign minimum lengths at all.

Re:But it looks bigger

[Anubis IV]

Agreed, hence the loud sigh I mentioned before I told students about the professor-mandated minimum length.

Re:But it looks bigger

[thegarbz]

Who the fuck needs a minimum at even undergrad level?

Certified Bullshit Artists. I believe they use the letters MBA.

Great news

[Anonymous Coward]

Now millennials will have more time to make avocado toast. Oh the humanity.

Helvetica

[Tarlus]

Helvetica was always my fluff-it-up font of choice in high school.

Re:Helvetica

[GuB-42]

Mine is Verdana.

Other tricks:
- wide margins
- increase line spacing

Then there are style tricks:
- short paragraphs
- lists are your friend

Also put as much fluff as you can: titles, headers, footers, etc...

Finally, avoid making your fonts bigger, it doesn't take as much space as it seems and it is too obvious.

Re:Helvetica

[thevirtualcat]

Oh, I loved margin tweaking when I was in school.

It works both ways, too. Need to page eight pages take up ten? 1.125" or 1.25" on both sides. Need to make a page and a half take up one page? 0.875" or 0.75" on both sides. Most printers don't center themselves well enough that a quarter inch on either side will be noticeable and for the ones that do, just widen the page guide slightly before loading.

I also found that using +/- 0.5pt fonts when a specific font size was mandated worked wonders on larger documents, too.

I had teachers and professors who would swear up and down that they would notice and/or measure that and that you'd get marked down for doing it. Never happened once.

I did see a few people who used 1.5" or 2" margins get caught, but come on. You're just asking for it at that point. That's like hacking into the electronic grade book and changing all your F's to A's.

Re:Helvetica

[tlhIngan]

I had teachers and professors who would swear up and down that they would notice and/or measure that and that you'd get marked down for doing it. Never happened once.

That's because with subtle enough tweaks, it's impossible to measure without having measurement error. The best margin to tweak is actually the right hand margin as long as you leave the Justification set to left (never fully justified). Left margin if you're in a RTL place, and again, never fully justified. This makes the right margin almost impossible to measure because word wrapping and the like ensure no line actually makes it all the way.

As for point sizes, remember a point is 1/72nd of an inch. Half a point up or down is 1/144th of an inch. If you use an inkjet printer with not good quality paper, the ink overrun will hide it quite well. Plus a lot of fonts you use will have different heights anyways - just printing out 12 point sized text in various fonts will reveal a variety of font heights.

You reserve the good quality paper for your cheat sheet to an exam where you can reduce the font size down to 4 or 5 points and with a laser printer on good quality paper makes it too easy to read. (Even regular copy paper works well enough with a laser).

Re:Helvetica

[thevirtualcat]

That's a good point about the right margin. If you're going to tweak the left margin, also make sure to tweak the top and bottom margins. It doesn't buy you much in terms of page count, but having different-sized margins is eye catching.

And even if you have good paper, you have to have the most accurate of measuring devices to catch the 1/144 inch (~0.2 mm) discrepancy by bumping the font by half a point. If you're a teacher grading 30 papers, you're not going to break out the high-accuracy calipers. But it's enough to go from 40 lines per page to 38 lines per page. (Plus possible gains from word wrap adjustments.) That adds up over five or ten pages.

Re:Helvetica

[Tablizer]

That may be why Bootstrap uses Helvetica also. Bootstrap is the king of screen-real-estate wasters (at least per defaults). It's probably done to make things easier for finger-oriented devices, but if the application will be run on desktops 90% of the time, which is the case at many orgs, then the waste adds up per scrolling etc.

Re: Helvetica

[Anonymous Coward]

Did no one else notice the newer font is San serif? Hardly a subtle change.

Re: Helvetica

[Tablizer]

Isn't "sans serif" a generic name for fonts lacking serifs "fringes"? "Sans" means without, and serif means a flaring out or spreading out at the end.

I used wingdings on my thesis..

[Anonymous Coward]

A+

Re:I used wingdings on my thesis..

[sysrammer]

Communications major, weren't you?

Makes no sense

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather like to have a font that makes my essays look shorter, for obvious reasons....

Marketing opportunity ...

[fahrbot-bot]

Trojan Newer Roman condoms look a lot like regular condoms, but each is subtly altered to make your penis look 5 to 10 percent bigger, without having to actually make it bigger. "Trojan: Rome wasn't built in a day, but it will feel that way."

Re:Marketing opportunity ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of like a toad hat

Re:Marketing opportunity ...

[sysrammer]

"Trojan: Rome wasn't built in a day, but it will feel that way."

And the serif enhances the pleasure. As George Carlin said, "It's not how long you make it, but how you make it long!"

Re:Marketing opportunity ...

[ayesnymous]

That doesn't make sense. Haven't you seen all those ancient Roman statues? All of the penises are tiny.

Re:Marketing opportunity ...

[fahrbot-bot]

That doesn't make sense. Haven't you seen all those ancient Roman statues? All of the penises are tiny.

Well... marble is pretty cold.

Re:Marketing opportunity ...

[zwarte piet]

also a big pipi was like a big nose or big ears: laughable.

This is bullshit!

[Gravis Zero]

What kind of sick person would try to trick people into thinking people are reading more than actually are?!

Re:This is bullshit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Advertisers.

Obligatory Bill Gates

[DontBeAMoran]

"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." — Bill Gates

Oh, to be young again

[Anonymous Coward]

When you do actual science, you will find that almost everywhere you would want to publish a paper or article has a strict limit on the page count, and that you usually want to go into more detail than that allows. Making something appear longer than it is is a juvenile concern.

a smart teacher will know anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

if they grade printed pages, they'll know. because they look at scores of each paper.

if you turn in pdf. their reader will substitute the 'real' tnr font and your paper will have fucked up spacing. if you embed. they'll know from file properties and size.

if you turn in word doc. same thing as pdf. they will know. except also add that if their word subs the real font, your paper ends up with nasty gaping margins or actually loses a page or more.

just do the fucking homework, people.

Oh come on! This was supposed to stay a secret!

[devslash0]

I've known (and exploited) this fact for years. Now Times New Roman will unavoidably get banned at schools. ;-)

Re:Oh come on! This was supposed to stay a secret!

[devslash0]

Newer* lol

1992 laser printer

[Anonymous Coward]

I had access to a laser printer in highschool in '92 and used Pagemaker to do the layout for a report -- the teacher noticed the slightly larger font and line-spacing that I was using as well as the slightly larger margins and used it as an example for the class, saying, "Don't do this!"

Re:1992 laser printer

[Immerman]

And that's why you don't try to get a 50+% increase in your paper's length using such tricks. If the teacher noticed, it wasn't a "slight" difference.

Kids These Days

[Thelasko]

Back in my day, all we had was Courier New, and we didn't complain about it!

Re:Kids These Days

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because back in your day, you were using an electric typewriter. The one I used had a 'backspace button'. It would automatically back up and press the key you'd just pressed 3 or 5 times. If you had the right kind of ribbon, it would white out what you just typed. We didn't, so I had to use those white out strips. Still better than that white goop that was the alternative. Oh, and centering text was a pain. If you could afford them, word processors were a wonderful thing.

knockoff camera gear font?

[magarity]

Pick a better name; "Newer" is a Chinese brand of cheap camera accessories.

Re:knockoff camera gear font?

[Quirkz]

It's also a play on words, going from New to Newer. I don't think most people would confuse font branding with camera branding.

MiSCHieF afoot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Subject says it all.

This guy discovered tepid water...

[williamyf]

... as we say in spanish speaking countries.

All of us played with margins, spacing, and fonts (to the extent possible) to make an essay look bigger, from the times of Typewriter, even going so far as to chose the typewriter to use among the three in my house to suit my needs, the most uncofortable one (but with bigger type) for essays with a set minimum # of pages, or the most confortable one for longer essays, or when there was no preset limit.

That's why, with the advent of computers, smart teachers request the work as a PDF and count words, not pages. Yes, a word count is also open to abuse, but less than # of pages alone.

Myself, I put a minimum AND maximum limit, both on pages AND on words.

Re:This guy discovered tepid water...

[sysrammer]

This guy discovered tepid water! News at 11.

Re:This guy discovered tepid water...

[Anonymous Coward]

Myself, I put a minimum AND maximum limit, both on pages AND on words.

Should add requirements on how many times each letter can be used too, just to mess with people.

Fixed-pitch fonts [Re:This is bullsh*t!]

[Tablizer]

Actually, fixed-pitch fonts like Courier may make a comeback in schools to make it easier for graders to verify sizing.

Either that, the submissions may be required to be in an electronic form whereby words and/or characters are machine-countable so that human graders don't have to spend time on such. The number of "pages" then is meaningless.

Re:Fixed-pitch fonts [Re:This is bullsh*t!]

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeesh, what a waste of time. The aim of an essay is to make a compelling point. If you can do that in one page without sacrificing clarity or compromising your argument then you should get higher marks, not lower.

Re:Fixed-pitch fonts [Re:This is bullsh*t!]

[Tablizer]

While perhaps true, an instructor generally has to set a standard for size of the essay so that students have an idea of what to aim for.

I suppose you could say "approximately 4 pages", but then students will invariably ask, "How much would one be docked points if it's only 3 pages?" Rather than get into that grey area, in practice it's much simpler to say "at least 4 pages", or better yet a range: "between 4 and 6 pages".

If students play games regarding "page size" and that matters to the graders, then other ways to measure "size" may be needed. I'm not saying how much "volume" (pages, words, and/or letters) should count in the grading process, for each instructor and/or grader has a different opinion, and that's kind of another side topic. The focus here is on how to measure if and when an instructor does want to objectively measure.

Re:Fixed-pitch fonts [Re:This is bullsh*t!]

[Anonymous Coward]

It works in Hogwarts too. I want 3 feet on the properties of bezoars by next class. Didn't specify text size - so Hermoine can cover the page with fine text extracted from all the reference books in the library, while Ron can write very large and finish the project quickly based on Wickedpedia.

Adamcemic" font?

[DrYak]

You had computer ? You were lucky !

We only had slide rulers and abacuses to compute our type setting and then ink feathers and parchment to render it !

Now snow out of my lawn both ways uphill !...

Ooops, somehow I think I botched that last one.

Re:Adamcemic" font?

[LynnwoodRooster]

You had type? Coddled, pansy-ass wimps the lot of ya! We were still dreaming of a day for a written language, having to stamp figures into the mud on the bank of the river and wait for it to dry while dodging lions and ostriches trying to eat us. And we were happy about it!

Re:Adamcemic" font?

[zwarte piet]

You spoiled brat. We never had a coherent thought in our whole lives. We didn't even understand the concept of language.

Comic Sans

[Roger W Moore]

The academic fonts are Computer Modern.

Rubbish. In my field we use Comic Sans for our most important discoveries...but that is because we are more interested in the information than the font it is written in.

Re:Comic Sans

[worf_mo]

My insurance company used Comic Sans for all of their written communications for the better part of two decades. Made it hard to take them seriously. I guess their head secretary must have retired now because the latest documents arrived in a more "standard" font.

Re:Comic Sans

[Anonymous Coward]

Comic sans is easier for dyslexic people to read. It could've been done as a form of accomodation.

Re:Comic Sans

[Cederic]

Comic sans is easier for dyslexic people to read.

Oh, I love that. Whether it's true or not, it's plausible, and beautiful for winding up people that loathe Comic Sans.

Although now I'm going to have to find out whether it's true, so that when I do wind people up I know whether I'm being malicious or honest.

Re:Comic Sans

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe it or not, for reasons I don't understand, Comic Sans is easy to read for people with dyslexia. Thus, it does have a legitimate use. That and applying to clown college.

Re:Comic Sans

[samwichse]

https://www.thecut.com/2017/03...

"“The irregular shapes of the letters in Comic Sans allow her to focus on the individual parts of words,” Hudgins writes. “While many fonts use repeated shapes to create different letters, such as a ‘p’ rotated to made a ‘q,’ Comic Sans uses few repeated shapes, creating distinct letters (although it does have a mirrored ‘b’ and ‘d’).” The ubiquitous Times New Roman, with all its serifs, is often illegible."

"...given its “character disambiguation” and “variation in letter heights.”

Re: Comic Sans

[jabuzz]

Really, dyslexic here and hate comic sans. Oh and it does not make things easier to read either.

What happy horseshit is this?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Times Newer Roman's website, a 15-page, single-spaced document in 12 point type only requires 5,833 words, compared to 6,680 for the standard Times New Roman. (That's 847 words you don't need to write, which is more than twice the length of this post!)

Well, that's just fucking asinine. As in: The. Worst. Reason. For. Creating. A. Font. Ever.

But I guess as we continue to devolve into stupider and stupider people, writing decent essays of any length will become more and more difficult, and strain our little minds beyond their diminishing capacity, so I suppose there is a use case for this nonsense.

Re:What happy horseshit is this?

[sysrammer]

Too. Bad. There. Is. No. Font. To. Fix. People. Who. Write. Like. This.

Re:What happy horseshit is this?

[djinn6]

You can write a browser plugin though.

Is this a joke?

[Anonymous Coward]

The original Times Roman font was designed with the purpose to fit more text on newspapers without becoming less legible. Why would any sane person wanting to design a font taking up more space use Times Roman of all possible fonts as a starting point? Is there some "largest dwarf" joke in there?

Re:Is this a joke?

[fyzikapan]

Because professors require that students use Times New Roman. If people could use whatever font they wanted, they'd just set it in Georgia or something.

Only monospaced fonts are enough!

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one (at least), think that all multispaced fonts should be banned from usage everywhere (computers, publishing, ...)!

Multispaced fonts always create text/word alignment issues/complications everywhere!

Why not try to save human civilization from (yet another) endless/countless chain of problems happening to countless people in all future times? (Keep in mind that even a little problem is an infinite size problem, when it happens endlessly!)

Mischief?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Times Newer Roman, a font from internet marketing firm MSCHF"
That company name looks like MiSCHieF - I doubt that's a mistake!

That's a terrible waste...

[VeryFluffyBunny]

...of electronic paper. Imagine all those extra virtual pages being needlessly created and clogging up desktop trash cans.

LOL! Did exactly this back in the 90ies!

[Qbertino]

I wrote my diploma thesis on an IBM luggable with an orange plasma display on Ami Pro on Windows for Workgroups. We adjusted the font with a font editor to meet the minimal pagesize. Nice to see the old tricks still in place. :-)

What a stupid idea

[sootman]

Just in time for papers to never be printed, or evaluated by page length! This font will do you no good when you're entering text into a box in an LMS with a built-in word count feature.

Also, if you can write 5,833 words on something, you can probably write 847 more. It's not like this will turn a 2-page paper into a 3-page paper.

It does not make any sense

[Gabest]

In my school years, all essays had to be written by hand, and sitting in your desk. How else could you prove it was not done by someone else?

Re:It does not make any sense

[Anonymous Coward]

educators ain't got no time for none of that!

Who counts the length of essays in pages anyway?

[DavidMZ]

In the European education system I have experience with (France, UK, Germany), the length of essays was counted in words, not in pages. Stringers can be paid (at least in France) by the number of pages, but I assume that the font is imposed.

Useful for videos

[nctritech]

Titling in videos can be annoying and having varied width options for fonts like this can help a lot with video titling. I like this!

Well, this could be challenging

[hyades1]

It looks like I'll have to get that tattoo on my dick redone.

css

[hcs_$reboot]

letter-spacing: .2rem;

Future textbook authors of course!

[Shompol]

All US college textbooks weight a ton and cost a fortune. The text is mostly water, meant to be skimmed diagonally as opposed to read. I come from Soviet Russia where textbooks cost pennies (also free education) and there was no incentive to bloat them. Russian textbooks were actually readable.

lying article too!

[Anonymous Coward]

The article says the vertical kerning is identical. But it's trivial to see the lines are taller in the 'new' font. Journalism! Words belied by attached images! God.

If your school is counting the amount of words....

[Anonymous Coward]

....vs the quality of content, then they are not teaching right.

  Before this font, people used a lot of filler words and phrases.

Font sizes

[Anonymous Coward]

Silly me... all I did was just set the font size to 12.1.

Someone tell the Chinese!

[lindseyp]

Just about every piece of English language text coming out of Shenzhen is Times New Roman, which is an awful font to read. If we sneak in Times Newer Roman instead, maybe I'll finally be able to read those little instruction books that come with my stinky Chinese e-gadgets.

As for essay-writing... Bookman or similar fonts are much easier to read, and give the documents a professional look that doesn't scream "I barely know how to use Word".

Can I Get a Newer Font That...

[WindowsStar]

Can I get a newer font that does the opposite? I typically need to get MORE text on a single page. :)

This is why my...

[Anonymous Coward]

... penis tattoo is written in Times New Roman.

The Wisdom of all fonts.

[InterGuru]

The commentators here can be seen as the wisdom of all fonts;

Easier to read

[Anonymous Coward]

Close to the end of the first article, there is a comparison of text in Times New Roman and in Times Newer Roman. Maybe it's just my eyes, but I find the Times Newer Roman paragraphs much easier to read.

Fonts vary wildly in size

[hackertourist]

and Times New Roman is one of the smallest fonts I've seen, making it suitable for reasonable-quality printed output only. A PDF with text in Times New Roman is painful to read until you really crank up the zoom factor.
Something like Verdana takes up twice the space.

Times New Roman was designed in 1929 for the (London) Times newspaper, with the goal of fitting as much text as possible on a page. Font design has moved on since then, fonts are available that are more readable than Times New Roman while taking up the same amount of space.

tableau

[Anonymous Coward]

Tableau Desktop 2018.1.1 arrival of Tableau (discharged in May 2018) presented numerous eminent changes, including another permitting model and a combination of usefulness between Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server/Tableau Online. (Scene Online is the facilitated SaaS form of Tableau Server.)Tableau Desktop 2018.1.1 In this blog we address the permitting model changes and look at the rest of the usefulness contrasts between Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server/Tableau Online.
Tableau Desktop 2018.1.1 In past manifestations of Tableau, the authorizing decisions were Tableau Desktop Personal, Tableau Desktop Professional, Tableau Server and Tableau Online. With this new discharge, the permit names adjust all the more intimately with what individuals are doing with the item: Tableau Creator, Tableau Explorer and Tableau Viewer. Tableau Desktop 2018.1.1 Scene Desktop, Server, Online and Prep are incorporated into various blends inside these new licenses, for instance the Tableau Creator permit incorporates both Tableau Desktop AND either Tableau Online or Tableau Server.

https://www.tableau2018.com/tableau-desktop-2018-1-1/

Tree Killers

[The Grassy Knoll]

Honestly, way to waste more paper!

WOOSHITY WOOSH WOOSH

[Anonymous Coward]

The extreme amount of woosh in these comment is fucking amazing.

This only works if...

[acoustix]

...the assignment is actually printed and submitted in physical form. If they were to submit electronically and the file was opened on a device that didn't have the new font installed then it will default to a different font, possibly showing the document's true size.

What academics use pages and not words ?

[Izuzan]

Once i got out of highschool all of my classes had a minimum word limit, not page limit.

This must be a joke, right?

[FaxeTheCat]

There are so many reasons this will not work in real life, that it has to be a joke.

Re:This must be a joke, right?

[FaxeTheCat]

On second thought, it is.

Backwards for grown ups

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are grown up and writing grants this is the wrong direction. Typically working against page limits and trying to fit more words in, not fewer. If this were a font that compresses say 2% but is equally easy or easier to read and indiscernable from TNR then that would be news. Letting kids write fewer words is dumb.