Well...from being in what most would call an honors english class, I can understand why my teacher got fed up and limited most of our papers to three pages. See, a lot of kids are very long winded and write a lot of stuff that has no meaning. I believe the best writers are the ones that are most concise, which is why I enjoy poetry. I don't claim to be an accomplished writer, but I've always been taught that every word should enhance your theme or the goal of your essay. Most school essays being pretty simple, it's really silly to write doctoral theses when doing a literary paper for a high school class. And often the key to being concise is changing things like "I came to the realization that" to "I realized".