The rumor at the school where I did my PhD was that they weighed the dissertations rather than read them. I took that rumor seriously enough to make sure that mine was extra fat and typed on the heaviest paper I could find.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote: ...and the most ego. I found this chart interesting, in that the longest Ph.D. dissertations seem to be in the fields most subject to opinion -- history, antrhopology, political science, communication, english, sociology, and education. It's almost as if the grad students in those fields are already preparing for an academic life characterized by the belief that the more they say about their opinions, the more they can pretend they aren't opinion. The chart reminds me of an old college professor of mine who had a big rubber stamp that he would wield mercilessly on papers he thought deserved it. It was the letters "B.S." -- always stamped in red over offending paragraphs or pages. When asked what the initials stood for, he would smile and say, "Bloated Syntax." http://priceonomics.com/the-average-length-of-dissertations/ http://priceonomics.com/the-average-length-of-dissertations/ This said, I disagree with whoever suggested that Stephen King "needs editing." I find reading his latest work a refreshing throwback to the days in which writers didn't pander to attention spans shortened by a lifetime's exposure to "sound bites" and artificially shortened exposition. The thing I like most about him as a writer is that he *takes his time* creating characters, so that the reader gets to feel that he *knows* them, before he does something with them in the plot. In "The Stand," King lovingly spent the first third of the book creating a character who was the quintessential great guy. And then he killed him, suddenly and unexpectedly, as the result of a mindless act of terrorism. You FELT that. You FELT the loss, almost as if it had been a great guy you knew personally. I am not convinced that this would have happened if he had given the character buildup short shrift the way most writers do these days. But that's just opinion, too. At least I didn't require 500 pages to express it. :-)
