This article was published in the 10th issue of "Literary Controversy" in 2023.
This topic was born in 2020, because in that year, Professor Zhang Ning wrote a wonderful article: "How long should today's long article be written?".》。After reading it, I thought, shouldn't Dr. ** also discuss the question of length and shortness?If I want to discuss, why don't I borrow chickens to lay eggs, apply this topic, and write an eye-catching article, thinking that the old man will solve my doubts?
It's just that the title is there, but the article is not written. Why?Maybe it's still not the right time. This year, as soon as the "busy farming season" in colleges and universities ended, I hurriedly picked up my pen, not because the time had come, but because I had read a few long articles, which made me have the desire to speak.
Before speaking, I must first state that I am majoring in literature and art, a secondary discipline under Chinese and Chinese literature, so I see **, whether it is a master's degree or a doctorate, I mainly use this major. But because I am not a stranger to the modern and contemporary literature major, I was either invited by a friend, made a cameo appearance, or was selected by the Ministry of Education's degree ** service platform, forcing me to comply. So, what I'm talking about, including this profession. I don't dare to say anything about other majors, and I can't say it well.
I remember that in this year's doctoral defense, an invited expert felt that a certain ** material was a little too much, and it was a little too long, so he said: "Can you compress the material a little more and make the ** more concise?"I think it is most appropriate to write 1670,000 words for a doctorate. The more you write, the more problems you expose, and it's easy to make people look big. As soon as she finished speaking, the length issue was "dismissed" by the other judges, because there is a tendency now that the more you write, the better it seems. Or, one long covers a hundred ugliness, and one short destroys all;If it is long, some people will praise, and if it is short, it will be scolded. So I chimed in: "I just participated in the defense of a Ph.D. ** at Tsinghua University, entitled "A Study of Community Thought in Literature: Bataille, Bronshaw and Nancy,* which is very thick and not crooked. The author clearly tells us in the change note that the full word count is 3720,000 words. This is the longest ** I've seen this year, but it's still not as long as the one at Peking University last year, which should be 50 tens of thousands. ”
I participated in one of the PhD** defenses this year.
What about 50 tens of thousands?When I came back, I checked it and found last year's article titled "The Two Faces of Crisis Thought: On the Nihilistic Critique and Art Discourse of Adorno and Heidegger". This topic hit me at the muzzle of the gun, and my interest was greatly increased, so when I read this article, I did not want to read it at a glance, but read it slowly, pondered it carefully, and naturally spent a lot of time. I also remembered that at the online defense site, I asked this student: This article is more than 500 pages, so thick a book, how many words are there?He said: 550,000.
OMG!This is probably the longest PhD** I've seen in years, not one of them.
What about doctors, masters, and even bachelors?At the end of May, at the defense site of our professional master's degree, I made a big truth: "In terms of length, I look at ** this year, and a strong feeling is that the bachelor's degree is master's degree, and the master's degree is doctoral." Of course, this is not a mouthful, but a feeling, because there is a 16The 90,000-word ** leads there, and the title is also very lofty: "The Formation of 'Leapfrog Critique': The Problem of Self and Wholeness in Adorno's Early ** Philosophical Thought (1921-1930)" (under the guidance of Professor Fang Weigui). The length of this article is likely to have refreshed the record of the master's degree in literature and art at Beijing Normal University in recent years. Coincidentally, not long ago, when I participated in the undergraduate ** defense, a student in our group wrote 100 pages (five or six pages in the afterword alone), and when I asked, I realized that it had reached 100,000 words. This article is entitled "The Statue of Reshaping the Collective Memory of Socialism: An Analysis of the Perspective of the "Child Generation" of the New Northeast Writers Group" (supervised by Dr. Li Sha). Because these two articles are both long and well-written, they have been recommended by both and have become excellent bachelor's and master's degrees selected by our institute to the Faculty of Letters**. In fact, using these two articles to apply for a master's degree and a doctorate degree should also be inseparable, isn't this "bachelor's degree, master's degree"?
In recent years, the defense of our master's degree has always been divided into two groups, which are the teachers and students of our group this year. Most of the six students are PhDs or preparing to do so.
This is the teacher and classmates of our group in 2019, and five of the six students later studied at Tsinghua University, Chinese People's University, a university in Hong Kong, and Beijing Normal University, and obtained doctoral degrees.
Therefore, in the future, if a senior wants to complain, he can "melt the stalk" like this: "The classmates around you either write 100,000 or 80,000, if you write 14,000 and 5, you are embarrassed to say hello to others." ”
Young people may not even know about this stalk now, so they have to release it.
In Feng Xiaogang's "Big Names" that year, Li Chengru had a line that was all the rage, one of which was: "The neighbors around you either drive a BMW or a Mercedes-Benz, if you drive a Japanese car, you are embarrassed to say hello to others." ”
But no matter what kind of **, the longer it is, the longer it is, I'm afraid it's still a matter of more than ten years, because at that time, ** is still not allowed to write long.
My Ph.D. was at the turn of the century, and I remember that my supervisor, Mr. Tong Qingbing, was talking to us about the scale, and when I was in a bad mood, I frowned, my face sank, and said: "What about your **, it is enough to write 100,000 words per article." Don't write too long, it will increase the burden on the judges and delay people's time. "When I heard that I could only write 100,000 words, I couldn't help beating drums in my heart, and secretly complained, but I didn't dare to theorize on the spot. After a while, I saw that Mr. Tong's face was no longer cloudy, but cloudy and sunny, so I tentatively said: "Mr. Tong, my ** topic is bigger than other students', other students only write one, I have to kill four at once, I'm afraid I can't get 100,000 words, can you give me more space?.""At that time, I had decided to compete with Adorno, Benjamin, Lowenthal, and Marcuse of the Frankfurt School, and if I wanted to level them out, which of the four masters was a fuel-efficient lamp?That's why I asked Teacher Tong for word counts.
As soon as Teacher Tong heard that it made sense, he raised his eyebrows, waved his hand, and said generously: "Okay, then I'll give you an extra 50,000 words." Then he advised: "It's only 150,000, but it can't be more." ”
I was ecstatic in my heart, thanking Mr. Tong, as if the iron abacus in "Three Mile Bay" had divided five acres of water to irrigate the land.
Mr. Tong defended a Ph.D. in 2011.
But as ** unfolded, I felt that 150,000 words were still not sufficient. However, if I ask Teacher Tong to add more words with a shy face, it is obviously very dishonest. What to do?After thinking about it for three days and two nights, I decided to "quietly enter the village, don't shoot anyone" - first cook the raw rice and then talk about it. After solving the ideological problem, I no longer have the worry of the word limit, but each part can be made vigorously, sprinkled with joy, and written until the end of the mountain and water, only then I remember that I can still sit and watch the clouds rise. When I'm done, put those four or five parts into a pile, Emma, it's already 250,000 words!It's broken, it's broken, how can I explain this to Teacher Tong?
At that time, students sent ** to their tutors, and they did not want to send an electronic version by airdrop, but bound into a book and handed over ** directly to the tutor. As soon as I saw that there were a lot of pages in the ** string together, I came up with two clever tricks to make it "**": one is to put the title of the four subsections in the table of contents only (called "Cunmu" in the beautiful name), and its content is deleted from the text, so that it is missing 50,000 words at once. At that time, many people played "cunmu", but they had not yet been born, and they really did not give birth;I'm different from them - I was born but I can't get a hukou, I have to hide it, like an illegitimate child. The second is ** printing, others usually use small No. 4 typesetting, and I use No. 5 word to pave the way, so that it is tighter and denser, and it can also save some space. I made up my mind, so I took the slightly bound ** to see Teacher Tong. On the way, I had already thought about it, and if Teacher Ruotong pinched the thickness of the **, he said, "Is this 150,000 words?."I can tell me calmly: "I'm sorry to write about it, but it's not much, it's only 1560,000 or 70,000." ”
Mr. Tong and the defense committee members Chen Chuancai, Cheng Zhengmin, Wang Xiangfeng and other teachers at the scene of my ** defense, 2002
Unexpectedly, when Mr. Tong flipped through **, he didn't say anything about the number of words at all, but scolded me with a split head and a face: "How can you use such a small word to print**?."And it's still so dense?Is this what I see?I'm almost seventy, aren't you sincere in trying to make me dizzy?”
Naturally, I didn't dare to explain the truth, so I hurriedly said, "Oh, Teacher Tong, didn't I pay it late?"In a hurry, I forgot to typeset it well. This is easy to do, I will go back immediately, change to Little Four, and give you another copy. ”
Before I finished speaking, Mr. Tong counted again: "What does the epilogue mean 'temporarily absent'?"Do you also have to keep an eye on the conclusion?”
No, it's not ......Because I was exhausted after writing the main text, I thought about resting and taking a breath, and then rolling up my sleeves and arms, and mustering up all the energy to go to the finish line. Maybe you haven't finished reading it yet, but my conclusion is in place. ”
So how?I think ** is to look at the front, look at the back, turn over the introduction, turn over the conclusion. ”
Ah, I see!That's easy, you wait for me for another day or two, this time I don't dare to be lazy and donkey uphill, but I have to hurry up, and the epilogue will be done soon. ”
When I came out of Teacher Tong's house, I didn't dare to slack off, but trotted back to the dormitoryBefore he could catch his breath, he turned on the computer, flipped through the materials, and threw himself into the last fight of "grasping the revolution and promoting production."
My Ph.D. was titled "Integration and Subversion: The Dialectic of Mass Culture: The Frankfurt School's Theory of Popular Culture", which was published at the time of the publication of the chapter on the purpose of the book, and the result was first published in 2005.3810,000, 2022 revision 4180,000, of course, this is the number of typesetting words, and the actual number of words is not that much. For example, in my computer statistics, the first edition was 2880,000, the revised edition is 3430 thousand. The reason why the revised version has 50,000 words more is because I removed all the literature reviews in the first edition. I was going to put it up, but Mr. Tong said, "You already have a lot of words, and if you add 50,000 words to the review, it will be too thick, and it will increase the burden on both the publisher and the readers." "I'm the only one.
But when I was preparing for the revised version, I thought about it and finally decided to put the review on it. In the afterword to the revised edition, I said: "When the book was forced to take out this review, I was very distressed. Now I have decided to include it, not because of the old disease**, but because I think that this information may provide some clues for future researchers. [1] This is telling the truth. And another reason why I didn't write there was that when I was defending, some defense committee members once bluntly said that my ** "lacks a literature review". Actually, there is no shortage of reviews, but I haven't done it well at that time. I put it out many years later to prove that I was right.
Humble Revised Edition, 2022
However, when it became a book, I was still ashamed to see the scale of our classmates' PhDs, because I did write more than them. If you don't believe me, I can list a few articles and compare them slightly (all are typeset word counts): Chen Taisheng's Liang Zongdai and Chinese Symbolist Poetics (Beijing Normal University Press, 2004), 2240,000 words;Wang Min'an's Foucault's Boundaries (China Social Sciences Press, 2002), 230,000 words;Liu Shuling's Ta Kung Pao and Modern Chinese Literature (Hebei Education Publishing House, 2004) 2520,000 words. Hu Jihua's Zong Baihua: Cultural Nostalgia and Aesthetic Symbolism (Wenjin Publishing House, 2005), 2610,000 words;Wu Zilin's Reproduction of Classics: A Cultural Perspective on Jin Shengsi's Commentary (Peking University Press, 2009), 3580,000 words. Except for Wu Zilin's ** word count and mine, everyone else is more than 200,000 words. And this number of words is also the ideal length of what Zhang Ning called a long story, because he said in the article mentioned at the beginning of the author: "The most appropriate length of 'short story**' is to read it in one breath within half an hour to two hours, 3,000 to 10,000 words." The most appropriate length for the novella is 30,000 to 60,000 words that can be easily read in one day. The most suitable length for 'long article** is a length that can be easily read in a week, between 200,000 and 250,000 words. ”[2]
Isn't there some truth in correlating the length of short, medium, and long articles to the number of words for bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees?
Or say: The so-called ** word count here is proposed from the reader's point of view, does it need to take into account the time spent by the reader reading?
Wang Min'an's Ph.D.**, this book has been taken over by several publishers in turn, and it has been reprinted many times.
Let me tell a story about Chen Zhongzhong writing "White Deer Plain", and I guess the answer will be clear.
Before Lu Yao wrote "The Ordinary World", the scale had been set: "Three parts, six volumes, one million words. [3] But that was in the mid-eighties. In the late eighties, when Chen Zhongzhong was preparing to write "White Deer Plain", literature lost its sensational effect, the elegant literature market began to shrink, and well-known writers wanted to publish ** collections, and the number of subscriptions was less than 1,000 copies. All of this made Chen Zhongzhong have to reconsider his **scale: it turned out that he planned to write "White Deer Plain" into two parts, "about 300,000 to 400,000 words each", but from the perspective of the market, "I quickly made a decision to write only one, no more than 400,000 words." Because if the book is published, "readers will save half the money by buying one book than by buying two, and the sales will of course be better." In order to save words and space, he decided to convert more of the descriptive language into narrative language;Even before he started writing this novel, he first wrote two short stories ("The Nest" and "The Wheel") to practice his hands and experiment with language. And in the end, "White Deer Plain" was really done in the number of words he expected. [4]
This is because of the success of reducing the number of words and reducing the scale of the work not only to win the Mao Dun Literature Award, but also to give it a good reputation among readers. Do you say it's important to consider the reader?
Therefore, anyone who is not able to write a long ** as "Dream of Red Mansions" should consider subtraction.
Mr. Tong is also a "reader-centric", he considers the defense committee when he defends, and he cares about ordinary readers when publishing. In Mr. Tong's assumption, the defense committee members or ordinary readers will definitely not be lazy or bored when they pick up this **, page by page, word by word, from beginning to end.
Later, I also became a member of the defense committee, and for a few years, I thought ** was quite serious. I remember that on April day in the world, I took a printed ** into Aosen Park near my home, found a quiet place to sit down, then drank tea, smoked a cigarette, and only read thirty or fifty pages in the morning, as if entering the rhythm of reading ** described by Ma Yuan: "Look** must make a cup of tea, quietly, no one disturbs, and my heart is very idle." ......The sun is so mild, you sit in front of the window, close to the place where the sun shines, and let the sun shine warmly on you. Then take a big sip of good tea once in a while. Read a short story for half an hour or an hour. About three hours to read a novella. It was a real pleasure to close your eyes after reading it. [5] But after a few years, I had to "save as quickly as I could", because more and more ** were sent to me, and ** was written longer and longer, and reading ** was an honorable and arduous task, and there was little fun to be had. And at that time, if I wanted to see from head to toe, unless it was written in a romantic way, unless it was written as a Rabelais Study.
Some of the PhDs I've seen**.
The previous doctor's ** were all paper versions, and after reading them, I saved them, and then I couldn't put them at home, so I moved them all to the office in 2019, and later gave them to the literature and art reference room.
Now that I've mentioned the Rabelais Studies, I might as well say a few more words. According to the Golden Biography, Bach finished the long story in 1940 under the title "François Rabelais in the History of Realism." But in 1946, when he wanted to apply for a doctorate in philology, he did not expect to run into trouble: three judges spoke highly of him, but three other corresponding members of the USSR Academy of Sciences strongly objected. The debate lasted more than seven hours and then a vote was cast, with seven in favor and six against, and no one in favor of giving him a doctorate. As a result of this accident, "this monograph has been lying motionless in manuscript form for almost twenty years, with the result that our philology has suffered a great loss, and not only philology......."”6]。
Teacher Cheng Zhengmin gave a lecture on **Jin Zhifu, I read this book 48A thick book of 70,000 words (referring to the number of words translated into Chinese, of course). I still remember that I read the Rabelais Study slowly, and I actually read it for half a year—not because I didn't have time to read it, but because I was reluctant to divide it by two in one fell swoop. This experience is unique in my history of theoretical reading, and I seem to have found the "tingling taste" of what Nabokov called "reading with my back"—when we read "Bleak Hills," we just need to relax and let our backbones take the lead. Although I use my mind when I read a book, the place where I can really appreciate the joy of art is between the two shoulder blades. It is quite certain to say that the slight tremor of the back is the highest form of emotional catharsis that human beings have attained in the development of pure art and pure science. Let's worship our own spine and the excitement of our spine. Let's be proud to be vertebrates, because we are vertebrates with a flame burning on our heads. [7] That is to say, if the long ** were for the sake of "Bleak Hills," you could have written 1,176 pages, and if the Dr. ** had written for the sake of "Rabelais Studies," you could have written 694 pages. But alas, you're neither Dickens nor King.
Dr. Xin's ** Defense, 2009
If you are an "ordinary youth", then it is necessary to refer to the rules set by the school when doing **. For example, every year, our university distributes a "Handbook for Undergraduates", in which the writing section mentions: "Humanities and social sciences are generally 8,000 to 15,000 words, and science and engineering are generally 6,000 to 10,000 words." "The university's "Graduate Handbook" (2021 edition) says: master's degree**, the number of words should generally be between 2 and 50,000 words", and doctoral degree**, in principle, no less than 50,000 words for science and engineering, no less than 80,000 words for liberal arts, and no more than 200,000 words".
I also saw a Wuhan University's doctoral degree ** writing requirements on the Internet, which read: "The number of words for doctoral degrees in science, engineering, and medicine should be controlled at 4-100,000 words, and the number of words for doctoral degrees in humanities and social sciences should be controlled at 10-150,000 words." ”
In this way, there is still a word limit for the writing of degree **, and they are indeed equivalent to the length of Zhang Ning's so-called three **.
Therefore, there is a "nonsense" I have to say: what is written long can be good**, but it is not necessarily good**.
If you write long, you will have a larger structure, more ideas, and more complex problems. Compared with the ** of 200,000 words, 300,000 words not only means 100,000 words more, but also means that you need to think about it more, and you must look left and right, and be better at fighting in the south and the north, so that as Li Yu said: "Where to build the hall first, where to open an account, what wood is needed for the building, and what material is used for the beam." Mo Yan once said: "Length, density and difficulty are the hallmarks of the long style, and they are also the dignity of this great literary style." [8] The same should be true of the Doctors**. That is to say, if your length goes up, but the density and difficulty do not keep up, then you will write a ** as a parallel import, and write it as a lazy woman's footcloth. Mr. Tong once criticized a doctor's ** for writing a compilation of materials, let us learn from it, I think it is absolutely not lacking in length, it may lack density and difficulty, depth and thickness.
In 2011, I defended my Ph.D. ** at Chinese People's University.
Reluctance to delete and modify is actually a common problem in writing. Some people may say: In order to find this information, is it easy for me to go up and down to the Yellow Spring?In order to write this statement, three more lights and five more chickens, don't I work hard?But all this is not a hard reason to stop us from being ruthless, and it is always the function and function of the text that determines the content to stay. Mr. Lu Xun said: "After writing, I read it at least twice, and try my best to delete the dispensable words, sentences, and paragraphs, which is not a pity." [9] Adorno said: "An author should never be reluctant to delete it, the length of the work has nothing to do with whether it is good or bad, and it is naïve to worry that the article is not long enough." [10] Compared with the two sages, my words are rougher: "If you use ornamental quotations, large road materials, if your exposition is just a bubble of urine in the Yangtze River - there is not much of it, there is no more of it, one word: delete!."”
Therefore, it is certainly not its length that determines the quality and color. Martin Jay's History of the Frankfurt School (Guangdong People's Publishing House, 1996) is his Ph.D.**, 3850,000 words, it seems thicker, but it has something to say, and it is still a desk book for the study of the Frankfurt School. Professor Chen Pingyuan's "The Transformation of China's ** Narrative Mode" (Shanghai People's Publishing House, 1988 edition) is also his Ph.D.**, 2370,000 words, it seems a little thin, but its problem consciousness is the first to open up a generation of trends, and which modern literary scholar can make a detour in front of it?Then I thought that although Weber said that academic research and artistic creation cannot be compared, after all, the results of the former also have a long lifespan. The longer you live, the better things you get. On the contrary, if ** comes out, it can only be used as a bargaining chip for the title, and the performance of the award is evaluated, in addition, it will not hurt grandma and uncle will not love it, so such a ** can probably only be cherished by the broom.
Mr. Wang Furen (first from left).
At this point, it's time to get to the bottom of the chapter. How long should today's Ph.D. ** write?In general, the relevant regulations set by the school will solve the problem. However, due to the bullish over the years, the "no more than 200,000 words" rule has no practical significance. In this way, looking at the example of the "pioneer brother" back then, we seem to be able to get some inspiration from it. China's first Ph.D. in literature and art was Mr. Luo Gang, whose Ph.D. was titled "Choices in the Confluence of History: Modern Chinese Literary and Art Thinkers and Western Literary Theory" (China Social Sciences Press, 1993), 2180,000 words. China's first Ph.D. in modern literature was Mr. Wang Furen, whose Ph.D. was titled "A Mirror of China's Anti-Feudal Ideological Revolution - Screaming, Hesitation, and Comprehensive Theory" (Beijing Normal University Press, 1986), 3890,000 words. These two **, the former has been praised by Teacher Tong countless times, saying that it is one of the three books that Luo Gang can pass on. And the latter is also well-known and famous, and it is already a classic. So when it comes to the scale of the doctor's **, if we regard Luo Gang's word count as the lower limit and Wang Furen's word count as the upper limit, is this more reliable?
Of course, to set rules for talents, we must also leave room for geniuses. In this way, if someone writes a doctorate of 600,000 or even 800,000 words in the future, we will not be startled and say that he is rebellious.
June 7, 2023.
Article**: Zhao Yong of the Northern Division.