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...if I only had more than 1750 stupid fecking words in which to do it

I did my child observations last week, loads of interesting, relevant stuff came out of it, lots of next steps, lots of good research I can quote to back up the points I'm making - but nothing like the number of words I need to do it.

Gah!

Well when you get it back the tutor will have written "you could have expanded on.... " and you will scream

Oh that sounds so familiar! I have never found OU word counts to be enough for what you would like to cover and like webwiz says, used to get very frustrated when asked to expand on ideas when I had no words left and the tutor could not suggest what to chop out.

However, on my courses, the OU have allowed one assignment per course to go above the word count by 10% without penalty. On my last course, I figured my project would be the one I would need the extra words for, so with my other TMAs, I made sure if I went over the word count, it was by less than 10%. With my project, I went over by 25-30% , despite days of pruning. However, I wasn't penalised for it and got 90%. Once again, the tutor could make no suggestions as to what to cut out, so I did feel justified!

If you have the same leeway as i did, then maybe check with your tutor and just go for it lol! Good luck!

Oh yes, webwiz, every single time!

DidIMention - don't think we've got the leeway to do this on this course, think I might have on my other one. I'm impressed at you getting 90%, I've managed to hit that for certain marking criteria but then scored lower on others, so my overall TMA mark has come out lower.

It's weird, when I was 18 and doing my first degree, so long as I got an essay in on time and passed it, I couldn't have given a monkeys what mark I got. Now I'm extremely old and funding it myself, and it bears a direct relevance to my job, and I really really love doing it... well, I find I care a lot more. Not very cool, am I?!

I could write a really stupendous tma if only i had the time/attention span/brain matter required. Just 3 years ago at college i could have done anything. Now my brain is mush and i have the attention span of a gnat. (not sure how long that is but hope its very very short).

Oh those where the days. If only we realised what we had, and made the most of it then.
(also, not sure why, maybe cos Im doing this out of choice now, but the marks matter alot more now. Im getting marks i once would have been happy with, but now its just not good enough. Maybe cos i have to put in so much more energy to get the same result.)

Sorry its so long. Frustrated rant over. X