I agree with Mindy here.

As a former dead tree technologist, I wouldn’t dismiss the word count quite so quickly. Slavish and limiting - yes an accusation that is levelled on a regular basis.

And you are right, it can lead to some trite work.

But it can also force creativity, working within constraint can lead to much more interesting work than being allowed to bang on about everything you want - it is more focussed. We’ve all read articles on and offline that should have been much shorter.

The question is, just because we can run as much as we like online - should we?

Years of conditioning will play their part in my answer I guess, but working to a word count is a skill that shouldn’t be undervalued.

And as Mindy says the difference between an experienced journalist and a newbie being told to let it run is massive.

Brain: Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?
Pinky: I think so Brain, but where are we going to find an open tattoo parlour at this time of night?

I give students word counts on essays and time limits on media as well. You’re right, without limits we tend not to get what we want. But is a word limit on a report, especially one for online, the best mindset to get students in to?

Chunking, effective sub-headings and othe page elements like pictures and video are all ways round ‘long’ article. These are more valuable skills to my mind. And given that multimedia in particular is a growing part of teh process, embeddeed in the page do we have to come up with equivilent word counts for that? (Actually I remeber being asked to do exactly that in a course validation but that’s the crazy world of academe)

I also take your point about the class of 20 . But just imagine if you could even get 15 of them to do that. Why, with that kind of power Pinky, we could take over the world ….Bruhahahahahahahahahah…erm(cough) sorry.

To me, it’s like saying a video must be 1 min. 30 sec. — if you don’t specify a length, it won’t be what you want. (Newspaper editors tell you in inches.)

The very top students don’t need a picky word count, of course, but the other 90 percent certainly do.

It would be, but … I don’t think I can expect 20 out of 20 kids to do that every semester! The kind of “measure” I’m looking for is one you can require them to demonstrate!