Exactly what I was thinking. Single characters for common letter combos (“oo”, “ie”, “qu”, etc.)
Why would you do that? The abstract just says what the paper is about; it is the tl;dr. It isn’t the introduction.
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Gee, I was always looking for fonts that could fit in more words per page without being hard to read… Guess I was going about it wrong 
Seriously, when I used to assign written work I’d give estimated lengths but always tried to emphasize that the goal was to express yourself clearly and present sufficient evidence un support of what you were asserting. The page ranges were just typical lengths to do a good job, not proof that one had done a good job or absolutely necessary to do a good job.
Unfortunately there is often a gulf between what one says and what students hear… for example, I once told my students that I hated sans-serif fonts (which I do), but several were concerned that I might mark them down if they used them. So although i did try to explain why page lengths were given it is likely that many students believed that getting their papers to completely match that number was key to receiving a good mark. And of course it wasn’t.
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I like this font simply because it is easier for my aging eyes to read.
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In grad school, my adviser would routinely tell us to write a 20 page paper and then edit it down to 10 pages.
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Generally for a journal paper in my field, abstracts are supposed to contain the key result as well. For conference proceedings, abstract is a pretty varied term. I have seen conference “abstracts” requested to be anywhere from 1.5 pages – essentially a mini-paper complete with a figure down to 35 words. It can be pretty hard to describe what makes your submission unique in 35 words especially in a specialist discipline where a lot of the other submissions that will be in the same session will have similar ideas.
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That’s why he got accepted into MIT for a math degree.
Really? In college parents get involved when their child screams “Unfair!” ?
I see what you did there. You’re using a larger font. Touche’!
Ah yes, I can recall playing this game with my teacher. Bigger fonts, triple spacing after a sentence ends, slightly more than double spaced lines. All on a dot matrix printer. I was not an honor roll student.
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I’ve only had that happen once in 11 years. They basically CAN’T because of FERPA, but this didn’t stop the mom from trying. Eventually, it came down to “if you get your daughter to sign this waiver, I can show exactly why she got the grade she did,” what with all the non-attendance, missing assignments, etc.****
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In high school I used to habitually hand in 3500 word essays when 5K words was the requirement. My language skills were really good and it was easy for me to put the relevant information and ideas on paper concisely. I also was a slow writer and hated the whole tedious process of grinding out these essays.
My teachers always gave me really good marks after nominally giving me grief for not following instructions. I was the student that read 100+ books a year.
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This was par for the course when I was in college. Few people were regularly using computers in 1991, so they hadn’t standardized things like this yet. Make the line spacing 2.1 instead of 2, the font 13 points instead of 12, widen the margins just a teeeeeeeny bit, and voila, my 4 page paper was now 5 pages.
It can be hard to describe what your submission is about in a paper’s title, as well.
Also, abstracts of, e.g., 350 characters including whitespace are a bad joke.
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The x–height of all lowercase letters has been increased by about 5%
I do like a higher x-height, it makes the font more readable and it feels a little more modern/casual.
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Use ctrl-F to made all your commas and periods size 14, kids!
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Especially if $\mu$ counts as five characters. And especially if javascript counter on the submission form has a slightly different idea of what counts than the server script that validates it.
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Exactly. When you are in grad school and you try to be more concise, and you still shrink your font by 1 and narrow your margins to 0.88.
Yep.
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I had a world history teacher in junior high (who was also one of the P.E. coaches) that I suspected of grading solely on the length of the paper you turned in. To test my theory, I wrote an intro page, a conclusion page, and 6 pages in between of Led Zeppelin lyrics.
I got a B+.
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…and subtly narrower sheets of paper.
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