English classes at the college level.

Just yesterday I received my first assignment for my 400-level John Milton seminar. There seems to be this preconceived notion that any class at the 400-level is bound to be much more difficult than those at any other level. It is true, that on certain levels, the demands of such a class do become more straining and taxing on the mind and body. There is more assigned reading, there is more discussion, and there is much more expected of the student in terms of his critical thinking and analytical skills. Which brings me to the next part of the class - writing. All English classes request some form of written evidence of thoughts, ideas, and arguments about the material that is discussed. Just before I received the assignment, I thought it would be a 12-page paper on some very obscure facets of the texts, but it turns out that it was a 4-5 page paper on any three given topics (which are not obscure, mind you). This made me realize that the demands for academic writing do not increase in a sense that we have to be more intellectual in the way we write (using harder, more advanced words; different styles, increasing level of grammatical complexity), but these demands are placed on the quality of thought and argument. Writing for a 400-level English classes will be harder than writing for a 200-level classes because the quality of argument and originality that is expected is very high. What makes it even more difficult is that the paper is only allowed to be a maximum of 5 pages! Writing is intrinsically devoted to the extraction of thought so that others may understand and benefit from the ideas, not whether or not you can string together a paper full of never-before-seen vocabulary and impossibly difficult syntax.