I requested a clarification on - what? I've been writing this essay too long. I'll start again. I asked Tom the logic lecturer what he meant by "4 to 6 pages" (which could really mean anything in essay terms - at single spacing I'm at the beginning of the boundary, and at 1.5 I'm at the end), hoping he'd give a word count, but he just replied that he didn't mind about the length as long as it wasn't a book and wasn't the back of a matchbox. The lack of a word count makes essay writing more difficult for me - a number gives me a feeling of security when I finally manage to pad out a piece of work to the required length. Here, I've no idea how much detail I should put in.

In this case, you can judge a book by its cover.

In fact, times are so desperate that for the very first time in two and a half years of University education, I have taken a book out of the library. Not the main library, but the one up at the top of Maths whose numbering system appears to be to randomly assign a string of numbers and letters to the end of the normal classification and arrange them in what might be called a very original order on the shelves. The title of the book that I eventually found is "Z: An Introduction to Formal Methods", and I've shown the cover (or at least an artist's impression of it) to the right. The hilarity of the design is not lost on me - in fact, I applaud them in their foresight to decorate the cover with the very emotion that reading the book provokes.