Beginning Volume 20

 

This posting marks the beginning of the 20^th year of this writing project.  This is the first post of Volume XX.  In the first nineteen volumes, there have been 790 posts.

It began in February of 2004 as a monthly e-letter to friends and family.  Marilyn Zavidow, a commuter friend at the time, named it - The Other Side of Fifty:  A Monthly Letter of Musings and Meandering.  In 2009, I moved it over to this blog and kept the name the same even though the posts are more frequent than monthly, and the e-letter is but a memory.  As stated in many Anniversary e-letters and blog posts, this was all inspired by the monthly letter of the esteemed French American attorney Aram J. Kevorkian.

As I have often wrote about procrastination and the struggle to sustain long term projects, this body of writing stands as a proud example of a wonderful and rewarding long-term project.  People kindly comment on how I bring insight and rationale to confusing issues we all face personality and in society.  Of course, the whole blog about nothing is the humorous and sarcastic side that is so necessary in life these days.  For certain, I do adhere to Marilyn’s tagline and do certainly muse and meander.

In these Anniversary letters or posts, I talk about my writing habits and processes.  My minimum length post is 500 words.  Other than it being a nice round number, how did I come to this minimum wordcount?  That seemed to be the minimum essay length in my senior year of high school and freshman writing class at Michigan.

As it is the beginning of the semester, I have recently week assigned papers in my Operations Management and Principles of Microeconomics courses.  I give a relatively detailed directions for what the papers should be about and what I expect including the rubric I use to grade the paper.  I purposely don’t stipulate a minimum word or page length.  Invariably, a student will ask, “How long should the paper be professor?”

I wait such questions and launch into a short monologue on the subject.  I ask the student, “Pretend I was your boss in some corporate job and asked you to prepare an analysis and report on some topic critical to our business.  If you then asked me ‘How long do you want the report to be?’  What do you think would be going through my mind at that point?”  The student would answer something like, “Long enough, I guess.” I would respond, “Yes, but I would also be thinking, ‘Why did we hire this person?’”  I will then give them a range like “500-700 seems to be the sweet spot for students that do well on this assignment,” and we move on from there.

I am happy to mark the start of my 2Oth year of doing this in the year I turn 70. 

I close with thanking Ms. Trosko! Which gets me to exactly 500 words for this post.