A perennial enemy of mine the last two and a half years at St. Andrews has been the Department of History’s word count limits, which are usually set between 1500 and 2500 words. I inevitably find myself tearfully saying goodbye to entire paragraphs the night before the due date because cutting anything else would be even worse. In the most severe cases, I stay awake until the wee hours looking for new and inventive contractions that will get the word count just a little lower.
This is all my fault, of course. One of the biggest issues I have had with my writing is that I usually bite off more than I can chew, using too wide a geographic, temporal, or topical frame for the amount of space I have. For example, last semester I attempted to write about Justus Lipsius’ legal legacy with the initial scope being Western Europe, Catholicism+Calvinism+Lutheranism, and the period from 1550-1650. By the time I finished the paper, it was much less ambitious (though much tighter and focused) with the scope being limited to Catholicism and Calvinism in the Low Countries, France, and Spain in the 1575-1625 period.
With that in mind, the limit of 5000 words for our project would initially seem to be greatly freeing. Yet I have the feeling that properly framing the project and accurately scoping out geographical and temporal limits will be just as important, if not more, than it was the past few years. Transnational history imposes no geographical limits on what we (the students) can focus on, and the term “late modern” in our course description is open to a degree of interpretation.
In any case, we have few natural guides as to where we should draw boundaries, geographic or otherwise, in our research and writing. In addition to concerns about word count, we also have to consider that we do have limited time to work. Taking too broad of an approach to research might sacrifice a certain “depth”; a 5000 word paper about American interventionism globally between 1900 and 2000 is likely to be inferior to a more in depth paper about American intervention in Central American between 1910 and 1940.
All this makes it imperative that we be honest with ourselves about both the limits of our writing and research abilities and the limits of ink and paper. 5000 words may seem like a lot, but I have a feeling that by May (If I’m not careful) I’ll be contraction-hunting once again.