Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

There is something about attempting to write a longer piece that makes writing a sentence much more difficult.

I’ll start with something that is probably obvious to everyone else in the world:

Writing doesn’t scale.

Explanation: People who can write a two-page piece, flop when they attempt to write a 20-page piece.

I continue to work with engineering students at George Mason University on their writing, and the students continue to teach me things. One thing that has been hammered into me by the students (I am a slow learner) is the topic of this post. Some students are assigned a three-page paper. They do fine. Other students, who are older and more experienced, are assigned a ten-page paper, and they make a terrible mess of everything.

For example,

Writing a sentence is writing a sentence is writing a sentence. Wrong.

Writing a sentence in a three-page paper is much easier than writing a sentence in a ten-page paper. For some reason, when many people are in the middle of a ten-page paper, sentences become garbled, long, complex, impossible to understand, and all other matter of angst.

Why? Please, someone explain it to me because I don’t know. What I do know is that this exists, that writing doesn’t scale.