Writing less can take more, much more, time
In his Lettres Provinciales , the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously wrote: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” In the second year of my master’s in applied communication, the 50+ students divided quite naturally into two streams: Those who had a core question they wanted to investigate with research and writing into a full-length thesis, and those who preferred to take a broader approach with a selection of courses and one long paper. I was in the second group. For the life of me, I could not come up with one sole question to hold my focus for the final year of study. Instead, one of the profs helped me translate my frustration at the often obtuse and dense articles we had to read into a short-term investigation of discourse conventions across different disciplines. In plain English, this means I investigated how a research paper written by scientists (about the link between exposure to light, production of melatonin, a