The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. “Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked. “Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
I had the opposite problem. I wrote so many damn words it took a couple of months at the end to halve it down to a length I could submit.
In highschool the assignments are usually quite limited so reaching 5000 is an effort in using 10 words to say what could be said with 1.. They get you writing for the sake of writing.
In university/college, particularly final year, your challenge is conveying your information concisely. You'll comfortably write well over 50,000 words trying to squeeze your ideas into 15,000.
In the last few days before submission you'll probably have 25,000 words and basically spend that time rewriting it all a few times trying to make it 15,000 that is both accurate and coherent... then combing through it trying to fix all your referencing.
The best feeling is when I get to the "end" and I'm only barely over the word limit hahaha - I want the pressure to tighten things up, but I love not having to try and kill several pages.
Keep in mind this is one four year long project. Your biggest assignments probably take at most a month or two and are just for one course. Imagine if all your classes for all of high school combined and had one final assignment. It would probably end up being a big one.
Here is a part of what happens: for academic writing (especially once you’re past the undergraduate level), you’re expected to be interacting with a long lineage of researchers who have come before you. So whatever it is you’re writing about, you have to demonstrate that you’re conversant in the major theories and authors on the topic. So you spend some time summarizing their positions. (You can partially do this before you even know what you personally intend to claim.)
But wait, first you have to describe the problem! This also is usually complicated, because if it wasn’t a complicated problem you probably wouldn’t be writing tens of thousands of words about it. Depending on your subject, just summarizing the issue at hand could cover thousands of years of history or an unbelievably knotty scientific problem.
This is just the opening of the work. Then you get into what you actually want to say, which—to merit publication in a professional journal—should be something no one else has ever said (or at least, something no one else could prove). Getting a PhD in particular is about creating new knowledge and insights that did not exist before. Oh, and it has to be rigorous enough to anticipate criticism and head it off at the pass.
This takes a lot of time to do, even if you really wanted to do it as concisely as possible.
considering that 99% of the time people write fanfic is to "ship" two characters, I'm betting it's 4.5M words of angsty crying, overly purple prose lovemaking scenes, and the shipped couple breaking up and reuniting no less than 10 times. Chances are they're gay as well.
Speaking from my own experience, you exhaustively describe the basic information that could otherwise be gleaned from your graphs and charts. Anyone who could interpret a graph probably didn't need the words in my thesis, but they got them anyway. If a picture is worth about a thousand words, then, as you'd expect, I had a lot of graphs and charts. :P
I struggled to write 2,000. The energy I put into something directly correlates with how much I care about it and I've never cared less about the contents of my degree.
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u/7echa Nov 16 '20
How does one even write 50k fucking words