Size Does Matter and Shorter is Better: It’s Time to Shorten Our Papers

In The Simpsons episode “Guess Who’s Coming to Criticize Dinner” (S11E3), Homer becomes a food critic and is tasked with writing reviews for the local paper. It is in this episode that he says one of my favorite lines: People will think what I tell them to think, when you tell me what to tell them to think. That line is not incredibly relevant to this Musing (aside from me trying to tell people what to think), but I’m a wordy academic who writes too much, so I’m just staying on brand. While I have always appreciated this episode, my appreciation has grown stronger since joining the world of academia. In this episode, Homer struggles to meet the paper’s minimum length of 500 words for a review, which seems funny to me because here in academia, that is simply our minimum length for a sentence. The episode chronicles Homer’s struggles as he attempts to navigate the world of writing despite his lack of skill in this area (sound familiar?). This Musing doesn’t discuss this episode at all, but if you know the episode, perhaps you’ll recognize the Easter egg in the manuscript.