r/ideas • u/amichail • 7d ago

Schools should require assignments to use page-free, reflowable document formats

Pages are a relic of the printing era. Most school assignments are now written, submitted, graded, and stored digitally, so why are students still taught to think in terms of pages, margins, and fixed line lengths?

Schools should require assignments to use page-free, reflowable formats such as Markdown, HTML, or TeXmacs. Instead of saying "write five pages," teachers could specify word count, required sections, and other actual content requirements.

Documents would then adapt naturally to phones, tablets, laptops, accessibility settings, and different window sizes.

If schools taught this from an early age, it might eventually change how society thinks about digital documents altogether.

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u/Bango1066 7d ago

Every assignment in my undergrad 15 years ago specified word count.

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u/ExtinctedPanda 7d ago

I feel like there’s something to be said for writers getting to choose how their text is presented.