English essay page length

DylanHarkin

Is one side of a sheet only half a page?
Our teacher recently told that 1 page means both sides which was a bit of a shock and literally doubled our homework. I cant find anything about this elsewhere which leads me to believe that either my teacher or my class are very misinformed.

spurious

One page means one side of a page.
How long the page is is another story.
One page of exam answerbook sized paper is about one and 3/4 copybook pages.

DylanHarkin

spurious wrote: »

One page means one side of a page.
How long the page is is another story.
One page of exam answerbook sized paper is about one and 3/4 copybook pages.

Well she's given us 9-10 a4 pages (in her eyes that's 4-5) on a poet. Is the exam paper equal in size to a4 pages?

spurious

It's a little smaller, because although the page is A4, there are margins both sides and the lines are quite wide apart.

How many marks are the questions that these 9 pages are in answer to?

Answers that are much longer than needed can be terribly waffly and annoy correctors.

Canard

Your teacher is spouting complete BS, one page = one side of a page. I vividly remember misunderstanding that in first year and doing twice the amount of work on a project.

As spurious said, though, page numbers are almost completely irrelevant. While they are a good guideline, your content is what matters, and nothing else.

thefasteriwalk

You should not be writing 9-10 A4 pages for a poetry essay. Unless you're a very strong English student, you'll actually end up losing marks. You won't have time in 45 minutes anyway. 4-5 A4 pages. Answer the question in every paragraph. Boom.

randylonghorn

Quality is MUCH more important than quantity (given a reasonable minimum: no matter how well you answer the question, you're unlikely to get full marks for a one page answer on Shakespeare, for example).