Writing an essay is a challenging and time-consuming task. However, we have some hot tips on how to make your piece longer when you need it.
Legitimate Ways to Make Your Essay Longer
When you get a writing assignment, you are usually assigned a minimal word count you have to achieve. If you are dealing with an interesting topic and have plenty of sources to work with, it is usually not a problem – indeed, sometimes you may have to cut entire paragraphs from your paper so that it is not too long.
However, when you write about something you do not care about, the sources on the topic are scarce, and you just do not feel inspired, meeting the assigned word count can become a seemingly insurmountable task. There are few things more frustrating than running out of ideas when you still have to write three more pages. So, what are you supposed to do if you get into such a situation? In this article, we will cover both what you should and should not do, so read on.
How not to Make Your Essay Look Longer
First, we will cover some of the methods you should avoid like the plague. Quite often, when students fail to meet the allotted word count, they start looking not for the ways to expand their essay, but for the ways to make it literally look longer. In other words, they do not change anything about the paper itself but alter its appearance to try and trick the teacher/professor. You can find plenty of guides on how to do it on the Internet.
Do not use them. Students who resort to such tactics seem to genuinely believe that their professors are at least mildly retarded while they themselves are extremely clever and resourceful. In reality, your professor is probably someone who spent years reading essays and saw these tactics used hundreds of times – more than enough to recognize them at a glance.
Some of these “methods” include:
- Spelling out numbers;
- Including superfluous information into the heading and giving each element its own line;
- Using slightly bigger line and letter spacing;
- Using a slightly bigger font;
- Increasing font size for punctuation marks;
- Increasing the margin sizes.
One trick out of this list may help you make your essay look slightly longer. But use more than one, and it just starts looking ridiculous. This leads us to…
Actually Making Your Essay Longer
1. Make Sure You Have Written Everything You Could
Ask yourself, “Does my essay contain everything it should? Is it possible for me to add anything?” Read what you already wrote carefully and check if you forgot to mention something. If nothing comes to mind, see if you can expand what you already wrote. Perhaps you can add an extra argument to the body paragraphs or add a few sentences to the existing ones?
2. Backing up Your Argument with Examples and Quotations
Most essay types suppose that you illustrate your argument with examples and quotations, and they can really help you grow your word count. However, make sure you do not overdo it. Using at least one example for each argument is viable, but start adding more of them, and your tactic becomes too obvious. It is even more true for quotations. An essay is not a very long piece of writing, and its goal is primarily to demonstrate your own writing and prove that you can talk about a certain subject. A quotation or two at strategic points of your essay are alright (for example, they are commonly used in the introduction and conclusion to attract the reader’s attention), but if there are too many of them, and they are too long, it becomes obvious and annoying.
3. Broaden Your Topic
If you said everything there is to say about a topic, but there are still not enough words, the only solution may be to expand the topic itself. You can slightly broaden the scope of your essay on your own, talking about something that technically does not fall under the assigned topic, but be careful – your professor may lower your grade exactly because you discuss something irrelevant. Consider contacting your professor and asking if you can expand the scope of your essay a little bit.
4. Talk about Counter-Arguments
Whatever point of view you support in your essay, chances are there are opposing or simply different perspectives on the subject matter, and you may address them to cover the topic to a greater extent. Consider the most important counter-arguments to what you say about the subject, and dedicate a separate part of the essay to discussing and explaining why they are incorrect and how you can refute them.
5. Do Extra Research
Of course, your essay is not an in-depth dissertation, but it can always use some extra research. Using a few more sources of information can give you interesting additional information on the subject that will help you add the much-needed extra words.
6. Add Factual Information
Facts, statistics, charts, graphs not just make your essay bigger; if they are legitimately relevant to the topic you discuss, they make your writing look more serious and advanced. Look for facts that play an important role in the analysis of your topic, and make sure you present them whenever appropriate.
What is good about all these methods is that not only are they less likely to annoy your professor – they are also actually more effective and usually even easier to apply than the tricks we discussed above. Truly unnoticeable visual tricks like increasing the size of punctuation marks can increase the size of your essay a little bit yet require an ungodly amount of fiddling and tweaking. Finding something else to write about, meanwhile, can help you write a few extra paragraphs virtually effortlessly.
Alternatively, if you have trouble writing enough on a given topic, you can simply look for help from specialists. There are plenty of services where you can pay experienced writers to work on your assignment, be it an essay, a term paper, or something else entirely. You simply have to locate a trustworthy agency of this kind, contact it and say, “Can you please help me do my essay”. This will most likely solve your problems with not being able to say enough about your subject matter.
