Tricks to make an essay longer or shorter

My essay is too short. My research paper is too long. Those are problems anyone can have while writing a research paper. If you're looking for ideas, tricks and tips on how to make your essay longer or shorter, you've come to the right place. Check out our ways to stretch and condense your paper below.

My essay is too short. How do I make it longer?

If your paper is not long enough and you need to make an essay longer, there are some tips and tricks you can use to stretch what you've written longer.

1. If you need to fill space, use lots of quotes, especially long quotes. Using MLA style, long quotes have to be set in, or indented, several spaces into the page and one quote can fill a quarter of a page, no problem. Just be sure the quote is actually pertinent to the topic being writing about.

2. 2. Need more space filler? Use an anecdote or story. If you are writing about an important person or event, tell an interesting, funny or strange story about their life or the topic. Find some way that the story connects to your essay.

3. If you include lengthy citations or source-credits (the author, name of the book or article, when it was written and such) within the text (as well as in your bibliography), you can fill in a bunch more space.

4. Be repetitious or use more than one example, quote or statistic to prove the same point.

5. When you write lists, separate each item into a separate sentence with its own thought. One sentence becomes a paragraph just like that!

6. 5. Finally, be wordy. Use lots of adjectives, or descriptive words, and lots of transition words (such as therefore, inasmuch, however, although, despite the fact, moreover...).

Examples

1. Instead of - "In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth is an interesting character. She has many important lines."

2. Write - "In playwright and actor William Shakespeare's immortal tale of darkness, murder and intrigue, the classic thriller Macbeth, the diabolical character of Lady Macbeth has long captured readers and audiences alike with her fascinating and sinister ways. In the play Macbeth, also called the Scottish Play by generations of superstition-following actors, the leading lady pulls audiences in with compelling dialogue, from “Yet do I fear thy nature;

It is too full o' the milk of human kindness” to the famed “Out damned spot! Out I say!”

1. Instead of "Statistics show that drunk driving is a problem in Texas, Alaska and New Hampshire."

2. Write "The ongoing and serious problem of drunk driving is a nationwide scourge that continues to grow by leaps and bounds. To cite some examples, in 1995 there were 13,000 people killed on the highways of the state of Texas, according to the National Institute of Made Up Statistics. Those numbers are mirrored in the state of Alaska, with 4,000 people killed every year, and again can be seen in the averages reported from New Hampshire, which tally up to 10,000 killed annually. In fact, the same problem can be seen in such states as ..." (Those statistics are completely made up, by the way - don't quote them).

My essay is too long. How do I make it shorter?

1. Read for quality of the content and be ruthless. If something isn't adding anything to a paper that's already pretty good, delete it.

2. Use contractions. Make "cannot" into "can't" and so forth.

3. Delete repetitious or unnecessary words.

4. Take out a quote or two or see if the quote can be shorter.

5. Delete examples if you've already proven your point with another example.

6. Delete flowery language and get to the point.

7. Delete adjectives.

8. Play with the paper margins, font size, size of the headers and footers, space between letters (calling leading) and space between lines. If your paper is double-spaced, switch it to .75 line between.

9. Decide if it's really necessary to fit into the length requirement. If the teacher won't mind that you go over by a page, then don't worry about it. If in doubt, just ask him or her.

10. Ask someone else (who is a good writer) to read the paper and ask them what is unnecessary.

More information: We hope this page was helpful and provided you with some information about how to make your essay longer or your research paper shorter or vice versa. Check out our main page for more articles here Can U Write.