[quote=Foxxie]
It's important to learn conscision of arguments, even if you eventually end up finding that you much prefer arguing without such concerns. And for the sake of professors, I support a of sorts, but a, say, 2500-3000 word limit has always struck me as arbitrary. Why not just say 7-10 pages and have something of a floating maximum so that you'll accept about 11?Word limits do definitely hinder those of us who want to write an honors thesis or eventual dissertation... those things are long and wordy as fuck, basically everything we were ever taught to avoid.
[/quote]

I completely agree that concision is important to learn, I just disagree with arbitrary word limits being the way to teach that. It doesn't really teach you how to be concise via effective and efficient communication of your points; it just makes you cut a tonne of important stuff out to hit some randomly-decided limit. If one wrote 6000 words of well-crafted, efficiently-conveyed, innovative critical analysis and thinking, and another wrote 3000 words of unfocused drivel that lacks any cohesive argument or point, I would consider the former the more concise, despite being longer, because efficiency/effectiveness is obviously decided by two variables - length [i]and[/i] depth. Word limits only give thought to the length, and thereby severely limit the latter, the depth, which is surely more important.

Though, of course, I understand the practical aspects of professors actually having to mark these. It's just frustrating, and I hate it when people try to claim that word limits are there to teach you how to convey your points effectively. They aren't. They're there for purely the purely practical reason of professors' time constraints.