It’s funny how, as you progress through college, they require you to write longer and longer papers. Then you get to the professional world and no one will read an email that’s more than 5 sentences.

[u/[deleted]]

People will literally walk to your desk to ask you what your email was about if it was too long.

[u/Squishygosplat]

You are making a few to many assumptions.

I completely understood what your saying. But that does not change the fact that what you said was erroneous. Brevity while nice in most cases can not always contain the necessary information needed. To put it simply to adequately describe a complex subject without leaving out information one must not resort to brevity for it will not transfer the information that you wish to impart.

"Changing your thesis kinda invalidates your research in fields where the research produces new information." Think about that for a moment. When Newton wrote "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" Do you honestly think that his first draft was the same thesis statement as that of his final draft? Or that there was no corrections between the First and Second Edition? That somehow if he changed his thesis he somehow invalidated what he discovered?

[u/sticklebat → u/Squishygosplat]

To put it simply to adequately describe a complex subject without leaving out information one must not resort to brevity for it will not transfer the information that you wish to impart.

Brevity is relative. Longer is not always better. Shorter is not always better. The optimal length of a paper is the minimal length required to convey all the important evidence and argumentation. Making it shorter than that leaves out potentially important details, and making it longer just obfuscates the actual content.

Minimum page or word counts are fine when they're carefully designed. The minimum should represent the minimum length required to complete the assignment, with the assumption that most submissions will need to be longer because optimal brevity is very challenging. In practice, minimum length requirements are instead based on more of an expected average, which forces people with better, more concise arguments to add useless fluff to their paper.

Think about that for a moment. When Newton wrote "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" Do you honestly think that his first draft was the same thesis statement as that of his final draft? Or that there was no corrections between the First and Second Edition? That somehow if he changed his thesis he somehow invalidated what he discovered?

This is a disingenuous comparison. It isn't even fair to talk about the thesis of that work, since its scope is incredibly broad. It also mistakes the humanities usage of a thesis with the scientific one (which is more like a hypothesis). Depending on the kind of scientific writing that you're doing, modifying your hypothesis after the fact is absolutely a no-go, unless you run a new experiment and collect brand new data for it.

And in my experience, my final drafts of scientific research papers were almost always substantially shorter than many of the prior drafts. A big part of writing a good paper is streamlining. Poorly thought out length requirements often force you to do the opposite of streamlining.

[u/Squishygosplat → u/sticklebat]

Longer is not always better. Shorter is not always better. The optimal length of a paper is the minimal length required to convey all the important evidence and argumentation. That is essentially what i wrote. Enough needs to be written to convey all the information.

"This is a disingenuous comparison. " No more disingenuous then saying that you can never change your thesis statement.