An Open Letter to My Philosophy Professor

"You can go under 10 or over 15 pages, but be reasonable. It is difficult to do justice to the authors' arguments in less than 10 pages (that would be about 3 pages per chapter, a ratio of about 10/1) but too much over 15 pages would make the exposition more than a focus on essentials."

Really Dr. Piscitelli? Has it truly ever been a concern of yours that a student in your Intro to Philosophy class at a community college might exceed fifteen pages on this assignment? You also express that we must be succinct. Perhaps my inclination toward brevity in essays is simply superior and I know no better, but I find it terribly challenging to be both succinct and breach the ten-page minimum you request. I absolutely respect the amount and quality of education you have received, but has it occurred to you that there are a few instances in which you need to dumb down the material to the bare bones basics to reach an audience that has only extremely rudimentary, or nonexistent, prior knowledge of the subject matter? I appreciate being lectured to as if I walk the halls of one of the institutions you attended, but it is discouraging to be expected to perform at at that level or risk failure. I have spoken with several of my classmates and I highly doubt more than half the class is capable of writing a paper that is up to snuff. Your lectures were not designed to help the student become more competent at understanding the language used in philosophy prose and gain a greater understanding of philosophical and epistemological concepts in independent study. They were themselves concept-based and while exposure to these concepts as they were meant to be presented (not in layman's terms) has given me a marginally better grasp on classical philosophy, I still find writing a lengthy expository essay on a text we have not even briefly discussed in class to be a struggle.