What Does the Ruler Say?

I’m not an educator, but I’ve been a student enough to know some of the tricks of the trade. When you don’t have enough material to meet the teacher’s expectations you adjust the margins, play with the font, and add a lot a pictures and graphics. A clever student could make two pages of content into a five or six page report pretty easily.

Now, let’s take a look at the front page of Sunday’s Greenwich Time. All three stories were Greenwich stories — a good start. But I estimate there are 120 “column inches” available on each shrunken Greenwich Time page. How much of that was “copy” (words in a story, as opposed to outlandishly large margins, pictures, headlines, promotions, advertisements, and the like)? My ruler measured 16 column inches, or roughly 13% of the available space.

If you were a teacher, what grade would YOU give the student?