I just happened to be looking at my Facebook newsfeed, and it seems to me that there is an ongoing "paper rush." Status updates such as "Done page 3 of 12," and "Only 300 more words" have filled my newsfeed. It makes me wonder, though--has school allowed us to view writing assignments as simply the amount of pages we have to fill with words, or the amount of words we have to place on paper to hand in to a professor?
What happened to writing something that you were passionate about--something that you viewed as a work, not as a countdown of pages? At this time in the semester, most writing assignments have become the opposite.
Then, we have issues of academic bullshit that arise once again--writing fluffy, imaginative ideas that are really too far-fetched to be truly taken seriously by anyone, but are accepted in the world of academia. So many issues arise in writing at this point of the year that I wonder if it is even meaningful for teachers to assign works to be due at the end of the semester, because the level of effort is usually devoted to fulfilling a word count or a page quota.
