Number of words

I saw one of my fellow students from the MRes today. He doesn't live in Milton Keynes so only comes up to the OU maybe once a month or so. This was the first time I had seen him in maybe a month. Anyway he was talking about the PhD process and went on to explain that while doing the MRes he wrote a total of maybe 50 000 words for the various assignments and the final dissertation. According to his logic the PhD only requires about 80 000 words, so, because of the word count he had amassed during the MRes, writing 80 000 words for the PhD would not be a problem - because he had practically reached that figured already, save for a missing 30 000 words? This kind of reasoning was common last year as we all seemingly rushed to complete our essays, and comments like "only 1000 words left to go" or "I need to find another 500 words before this essay is done" littered Facebook status updates.




I could never understand this mentality (and still don’t) - what difference does it make that you can write 50 000, 80 000, 100 000 words - surely anybody can write 50 000 words? What is this obsession with a meaningless attempt to quantify the task of writing an essay or indeed a PhD thesis? But this kind of thinking is pervasive here, I seem to be the lone voice saying - "word counts don’t tell you anything!" Recently one of my colleagues, who I also call a friend and respect greatly, was trying to sum up our first year by looking at the outcome expected i.e. a 10 000 - 12 000 word overview of the literature, research methodology and research proposal. Again in his mind the amount of words required indicated a fair minimal task for a year's work. Surely it's the quality of the words used and how they articulate and outline your ideas, thoughts, conceptualisations and analytical insights  and argument that is important - the word length acts to guide the structure and possible style of the discussion, but accounts for nothing more than that.