How to make your essay longer and better
How to make an essay longer word count
One of the important parts of any college-level essay is its length. If you want to prove to your professor that you have thoroughly read your prompt’ instruction, you have to follow the instructions on style requirements to the letter. This can be proof of your obsession with your writing as well.
You should never be under the minimum page count or word count in your final draft when you write a good paper. The solution is filling your paper with valuable content. The problem is that trying to make an essay longer can be truly frustrating.
If you are looking for techniques to make your essay lengthier, you should check out our tips and tricks for making your essay longer! Although there are many style-related ways to make your paper “look” longer (like using bigger font size or larger margins or both!), they won’t pass unnoticed in a professional eye. You can fulfill the minimum requirements for your papers’ length in no time at all. Just follow the tips we provide you with.
Table of contents
Seven tips on how you can write a longer essay
1. Revise Your Introduction and Conclusion
It is quite common for ideas to evolve during the process of writing. If you wrote the introduction before anything else, go back to it and reread that first paragraph. This way, in case you have forgotten to mention some key information that helps your readers understand your arguments more clearly, you can add them there.
Recommended article: How to Write an Essay Introduction
When you start revising your conclusion, you should make sure that you have mentioned your major points briefly and a solution for your readers’ further preoccupation. Revise your conclusion again if you haven’t done this.
2. Provide More References & Evidence
You can strengthen your paper by simply providing more evidence for your arguments. Although, you should not forget to provide references for the evidence you provide. You should try going back to your outline and see how you can support your argument(s). Work on the details. In case your essay aims to persuade the audience, you can use the counterarguments to increase your paper’s length and add more academic value to it! Provide evidence that would beat the counterarguments.
3. Get well into the details
If you wonder how descriptive one might get when writing on a particular subject, you should know that there is no end to it! Getting into every little detail and being as descriptive as possible helps you increase your paper’s length. Although, you should be cautious not to overuse this technique to prevent further objections.
4. Take advantage of some Quotations
One of the most convenient ways to increase the word count of your paper is by adding quotations. The only problem is that to do so; you have to rewrite big parts of your text. You can solve this little problem by doing further research on related keywords. Choose the best location for each quote in your text in a way that benefits your argument the most. At any rate, you should take heed not to overuse quotations in your writing because you might end up losing your voice!
5. Try to avoid Contractions and Abbreviations
Generally speaking, adding contractions to your essay is not problematic, but contractions give a certain casual air to your writing. If you are trying to establish your writing status as serious, you should use longer versions instead of contractions. This way, you can make your paper longer. When using abbreviations, you should know that they are probably not the best options for research papers. When you are in doubt on whether to use abbreviations or not, check your style guide.
6. Define your keywords
Try to define the key terms regarding your argument. If your paper is about the loss of identity in postmodernist literature, try to define these keywords as clearly as possible: identity, loss of identity, postmodernism, literature. Even you can discuss their history as you are defining your key terms. This way, you will have a more reliable and longer paper!
When you aim to write at an academic level (college or university courses), you must pay attention to defining your key terms accordingly by proper references. Do not use dictionary chunks to define your keywords.
7. Search for new ideas in class handouts!
To be more innovative and come up with new ideas, you can go back to your class handouts. They can function as valuable sources for you. You should try to utilize all your sources, so go back to them and add more key points to your paper. Some of them are listed below:
- Class handouts
- Articles that you were asked to read
- Slides for lectures
Avoid Obvious Tricks
As we mentioned before, there are lots of tricks to make papers longer. Some of them are obvious enough, and some others can be found by an online search quite easily. The problem with most of these tricks is that they work when you want to reach a minimum page count, and most of them are useless when you have to get a pass on your word count. Most of these tricks have been around for decades, and students have been taking advantage of such tricks for a long time; therefore, professors are quite familiar with them. If you don’t want to harm your academic reputation as a poor writer with cheap tricks, avoid these obvious tricks:
- Don’t expand lines and the characters spacing
- Don’t over enlarge the header
- Don’t play with the font size (like making it 13.5pt instead of 12pt)
- Don’t try to expand the margins
- Don’t use bigger fonts for all the periods and commas
- Don’t use numbers written form (like writing “10” instead of “ten”)
In this article, you found out seven tips on how you can write a longer essay. Still need help with your essay?
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