alt Hacker NewsHave a second of critical thinking on this topic will make it abundantly obvious why this line of questioning is anti-education and anti-intellectual. You write in school to practice. No just composition, but grammar, spelling, individual sentences. Practice requires volume.
Subject yourself to a classroom of kids that you must teach to write, and throw out minimums. Will some students do fine? Sure, of course, and what of the others that turn in one sentence? That never grow? That have to go into the math class and hear their idiot parents say "why are you learning that we have calculators"
Replies
> Subject yourself to a classroom of kids that you must teach to write, and throw out minimums.
Strawman argument; the correct thing to do is not to throw out minimum word count and leave it at that, rather to emphasize the role of brevity and concision while still being sufficiently thorough.
It's widely understood that LOC is a poor measure for many coding purposes, so it shouldn't be controversial that word count is an equally flawed measure for prose.
Why not have the students write more essays instead?