Slashdot Mirror
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!)
The academic fonts are Computer Modern.
Times New Roman is for people who use Microsoft software, not academics.
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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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.
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.
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.