Just before the Christmas break there was a meeting to discuss the university’s requirements for the dissertations that Masters students will complete over the summer of 2011.
The permitted length for these dissertations is 15,000 words. We were told that dissertations that exceeded the word limit by less than ten per cent would not be penalised, but any excess of ten per cent or over would incur a penalty.
Without so much as a deprecatory smile or a hint of irony, a distinguished professor informed a roomful of post-graduate students at a Russell Group university of the importance of ONE FUCKING WORD. Dissertations up to and including 16,499 words – no problem; dare to write just one word more, 16,500 words, and the full wrath of university displeasure would descend upon us. In the name of equality, of course.
I’m clever. I start sentences with 'and'. And I use long words. Epistemological, exculpatory, shit like that. I never use ‘rapprochement’, though. That’s because Malcolm Tucker from ‘The Thick Of It’ says it doesn’t make me sound clever, it makes me sound like a cunt, and I’m not arguing with Malc. Plus I don’t know what it means. I digress.
The word count in Microsoft Word doesn’t actually count words. It counts spaces. So ‘a’ counts as one word and so does ‘anti-disestablishmentarianism’. That means that my 16,499 words will contain way more characters than some of the other dissertations. Where’s the equality in that?
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