IT IS NEITHER AMAZING, NOR COLOSSAL, NOR A SYLLABUS.

It's too darned long.

If you’re a faculty member, you’ve spent the last few weeks preparing your syllabus for the spring semester. You’ve updated the document and added a little to it. This latest round of edits may have pushed your syllabus another page longer — most now run about five pages, though nearly every campus has lore of some that exceed 20.

Lamentations about syllabus bloat started emerging about seven years ago in moods ranging from nostalgia to bemusement to curiosity to irritation to full-blown ideological critique. Based on 20 years of serving on curriculum committees and working with academics across the disciplines on teaching, I agree that, yes, the typical syllabus has now become a too-long list of policies, learning outcomes, grading formulas, defensive maneuvers, recommendations, cautions, and referrals. As a writing-center director who has encouraged instructors to add a pitch for tutoring services, I’m complicit.

About a year ago I started asking students how much they typically read of a multipage syllabus. Most told me they simply stop reading on Page 2. Even the high achievers rolled their eyes at long syllabi.

I would hope it is "especially" the high achievers.  Conditions of carriage are for ships at sea in times of war and unimaginative process worshippers.

My preference for a shorter syllabus started inching in this direction about six years ago when a cluster of faculty members who regularly teach the same course in my department shared their course materials with me. I found all of their syllabi to be smart and dutiful — but one stood out because it read like an invitation to a party, even as it promised just as much intellectual rigor as the others and articulated clear ground rules.

My syllabus, by contrast, read more like a mortgage. I was trying to cover every contingency. The core problem, I realized, was that I was thinking of the syllabus as a contract. Indeed, that seems to be the default metaphor of syllabus design, and multiple pages amplify the effect.

Multiple pages apparently have led to a new convention, syllabus week, and perhaps faculty recovering some of their classroom time for, oh, teaching and learning, might be a favorable development.

I’ve noticed a pleasantly jarring effect when I hand out my own syllabus on a single sheet of paper (with information on the back and front). Students flip it over a few times, as if looking for hidden pages. They look up, expecting more. When we review it together, there are no faces behind screens, and we move through it pretty swiftly. (For me, syllabus review is never the centerpiece of the first day of class — I give it about 10 minutes and then move on to the reading assignment I have sent students in advance … but that’s a topic for another column.)

The balance of the essay anticipates most of the objections the process-worshippers will raise; if you are still facing the classroom, read and understand and trim your course outline, and make constructive use of your course management platform.

Yes, dear reader, I did say course outline.

The two-pager still includes my major readings, themes, and assignments. It is akin to the abbreviated table of contents we find in some books. This approach allows students to see the basic shape of the semester and for me to explain why I do what I do much better than a detailed grid of weekly readings and assignments does. The more simplified initial approach takes us closer to the etymology of "syllabus," which came from a misreading of Latin sittybas, from Greek sittuba for parchment label, title slip, or table of contents.

Bingo.