Finishing up my term, I have had to write several final papers and projects of course. For as long as I can remember, when I was assigned a paper it is usually accompanied with a good old page count. "Write me 4 pages!" "Write me 5 pages!" "Write me 8 pages on this subject!" But every once in a blue moon, a teacher gives an assignment and says something that always takes me off guard at first. "Write me 800 words." My reaction is usually unsure. Since it is so rare to be asked to do something by word count I do not have a very firm grasp on exactly how long that is or really how much effort I need to put into it. But I have recently realized that I far prefer to be asked to meet a word count than a page count.
When I am usually assigned these assignments it is often about something I am not very enthusiastic about. Being a graphic design major means I am not all that interested in writing about most academic things, but to each his own. But I have found that when I am writing about things that i do not care much about and am just trying to finish the assignment and my end goal is to fill the space on my screen with text then the way that I am thinking about the assignment is "I will be down if I just say a lot of things whether they are important or not". But when I approach an assignment where my end goal is reach a certain amount of words then i had noticed the way thought about the assignment was different. Instead of trying to fill all this space with just stuff and whatever it was that came to mind, I was actually breaking down my ideas. By doing this, when I am assigned a 1,200 word essay instead of thinking "I need to come up with 4 pages of content" I think "Ok, If I can come up with maybe 6 topics to touch on then I only need to talk about each one for about 200 words give or take". And 200 words is child's play! I often myself exceeding my personal limit.
I also noticed when I started approaching my assignments this way, I found that the pages numbers came flooding in. Before I knew it I had written 5 pages easy. So now that I am a little acclimated to how long word counts are, when assigned a page count I convert it to a word count and commit myself to that number and just write away.
I totally understand where you are coming from on not being able to grasp how many pages a certain word count. I felt that way during this class because I usually get assigned pages as well. For me it doesn't really make to much of a difference on pages or word count in the end. I do like your strategy on breaking a paper up into topics to get a better grasp. I should try using this tactic in the future.
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