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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.
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.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Helvetica was always my fluff-it-up font of choice in high school.
/* No Comment */
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 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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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."
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What kind of sick person would try to trick people into thinking people are reading more than actually are?!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight." — Bill Gates
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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.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
"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.
I've known (and exploited) this fact for years. Now Times New Roman will unavoidably get banned at schools. ;-)
Back in my day, all we had was Courier New, and we didn't complain about it!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Pick a better name; "Newer" is a Chinese brand of cheap camera accessories.
... 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.
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
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.
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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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.
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.
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.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
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).
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
...of electronic paper. Imagine all those extra virtual pages being needlessly created and clogging up desktop trash cans.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
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. :-)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Communications major, weren't you?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
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.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Too. Bad. There. Is. No. Font. To. Fix. People. Who. Write. Like. This.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
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?
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
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!
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It looks like I'll have to get that tattoo on my dick redone.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
letter-spacing: .2rem;
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
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.
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".
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Can I get a newer font that does the opposite? I typically need to get MORE text on a single page. :)
The commentators here can be seen as the wisdom of all fonts;
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???
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
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.
Honestly, way to waste more paper!
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
You can write a browser plugin though.
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."
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.
...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.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Once i got out of highschool all of my classes had a minimum word limit, not page limit.
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
There are so many reasons this will not work in real life, that it has to be a joke.
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.
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
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?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'