Thanks, Green Bean, but teach beat ya to it gave us specific format instructions and said any diviation from said instructions would get us a big fat 0! :mad:
I appreciate the advice though.
A girl
What is this world coming to? You can’t change the margins? Have you considered organizing a sit-in to protest the abolition of historic student rights?
My favorite was always to change the line spacing from 2.0 to 2.1. Instant 5% increase in length and not very noticable.
I’ve been laughing so hard, my cat got offended and got off my lap. Thanks guys.
as the ultimate queen of procrastination my answer is sleep.
The longer you deprive yourself of it, the more work you get done. Do not sleep until it is done, and dont forget to spellcheck:)
Well, I’ve done about all the research I can do, it’s time to start typing! I like the idea of changing the line space… I do have a couple of page-size graphs… heh heh heh…
As soon as I’m done with my artichokes, I’m going to go for it!
And no, I won’t sleep until I’m done… I know myself to well, haha! I hope it doesn’t take too long though, 'cause I do need to get some sleep, the final is tomorrow, and it, of course, is writing an essay! I HATE writing in longhand!
Well, here goes!
A girl
Omigod! The teach gave you specific formatting instructions? Whatta megalomaniac! What about your God-given right to stretch a 4-page paper into a 7-page paper?
Fight the Power!
If you have Bookman fonts they are larger than courier(20% gain off of Time New Roman.)
Also most teachers won’t notice a smallincrease in margins-though if you think they’ll be checking this is the one to leave out. (It’s just too easy for your teacher to hold one page of your paper up against another and put it up to a lamp.)
2.15 spacing is nearly indistinguishable from 2.0 spacing and will gain you a line or two. Also use 12.2 font, (just access the font menu, and instead of selecting a font size from the list just click on the little box, and write “.2” in next to the 12)
Finally if you have WordPerfect they have a useful little option that lets you pick the length of the paper and it will mess with all these little variables to get it to that length. It’s good if you’re in a hurry-but honestly I always feel safer doing it myself.
I once had a prof (honours English) who measured all the margins, line-spacing, and fonts, and took off marks if they deviated from his standards. He also counted the number of times we used the verb “to be” and took off marks if we used more than five per page.
I loved this man. I’m a better writer and researcher now than I was when I started school.
Damn, just thinking about the exacting standards of my alma mater gets me angry at what my husband the TA has to go through with his students here at Caltech … a bunch of lazy asses all of them.
See, I straddle both sides of the fence on this issue, because I teach college. But I also had a long and illustrious career as an undergraduate, and I have used all the sneaky formatting tricks in the book.
(My grad school professors are a lot less concerned about paper length than my undergraduate professors were. Unfortunately, they do want you to have a significant amount of content in the papers…)
I don’t give my students formatting guidelines, and I explain to them that the suggested paper length is really only an indicator of how “deep” and how “broad” the paper should be. A 3-5 page analytical paper is quite different than a 15 page analytical paper (not that I ever assign those). I frequently assign the 3-5 page ones. I don’t really care about the actual number of pages handed in, but I have never seen a student do the subject justice in less than 2.5 to 3 “honest” pages. I almost never notice “formatting tricks” because I don’t look for them. I care a lot more about whether a student has adequately defended his/her thesis.
But every now and then it’s so obvious that I do notice. And frankly, it makes me take a much closer look at the paper and I probably end up grading it more harshly. I have seen papers with 16-point fonts and ones with 2.5-inch margins all around–yep, that’s right, a 3 inch column of text right in the middle of the page. I actually got out a ruler and measured that one.
On the other hand, as a student I have written plenty of papers that have fallen short length-wise (but are okay in terms of content) and so I have stretched the paper.
I guess the point is that I accept paper-stretching as a normal practice. Stretch away–but don’t let the professor notice.
I could be the only student in the world that never had a problem doing the required 20 page papers blathering on about the Odes to Moby Dick. Not that I ever read the required reading. Never bought Cliff’s Notes either. Just skimmed and let my faithful pen guide me across the paper.
On every paper I did the night before, or even the morning of, I received an A. The ones I thought about were not so good.
There’s a moral here, I’m sure if I think about it…it won’t come to me.
What the heck is the paper on? As a former English grad, I’m intrigued…
It’s interesting how American institutions are so fixated on page-length, with American students trying to manipulate that standard through smaller/bigger margins, smaller/bigger fonts, etc.
I got my M.A. in England, and all paper lengths were dictated by word count. No real way to “cheat” there…
BTW, a girl, Good Luck