Library Assignment

Some professor or other decided that we need practice using the library and its databases, so that we'll be familiar with doing literature searches and whatnot when we're big bad vets. It's a reasonable aim, since most of my classmates probably didn't read a hundred stupid journal articles for their undergraduate senior project like I did. However, the assignment they gave us needs to be sorely rethought.

What we were supposed to do was pick any anatomical structure we wanted, then look up four journal articles about it. We were supposed to write a nice little essay giving a description of the structure and its normal function, and devote a small section to clinical signs of disease and dysfunction. Sounds nice when I put it like that, doesn't it? The catch is that we had to use no more than 150 words. One hundred fifty words! Four references, not counting any textbooks we needed to supplement the anatomy description. 

No more than 25% of the essay was supposed to be about the disease part. 25% of 150 words. 

The thing about primary literature, is that people doing studies don't bother describing their structure of interest, because it's a waste of space. You're not going to be looking up a study of drug effects on the development of auditory ossicles if you have no clue what the fuck an auditory ossicle is. Most literature assumes you actually know the stuff that you were supposed to learn in med school and can easily reference in the textbooks. Studies are going to be about pathology, clinical signs, drugs, that sort of thing. So in practicality, you end up with four references for 25% of a 150 word essay. Not to mention that the citations are included in the word count.

To make matters worse, we have to peer review four other people's (anonymous) essays and hand them back in. Supposedly, by marking someone else, we'll learn how to better improve our own writing. What were they thinking? How could anyone possibly learn anything from a 150 word assignment? Everyone was too busy trying to squeeze unnecessary words out to worry about writing well. The result was choppy sentences and truncated thoughts. This isn't helping us learn to write concisely, and it's not helping us critically assess each other because there's just not much you can say about something so short.

We were supposed to include the word count on the page. I had 151 words and said my count was 150, no big deal. Three of the ones I had to grade also said their word count was 150 words. One of them was a line or two longer than the others. Hmmm.

I counted to be sure. They had 160 words. Nice try.