The most frustrating experience you’ll have in school is when you don’t have enough words to finish the assignment. You might feel that you’ve covered the subject entirely in some cases, which could leave you unsure of how to extend the essay length.
Unfortunately, many tricks to make your essay longer entail including pointless details or changing the font size and spacing. These techniques may lengthen your essay visually, but they violate your paper’s formatting standards, thus, compromising your performance.
Read on to discover the ways to make an essay longer without losing your marks.
How to make essays longer
- Elaborate ideas further
To stay within the allotted word count, we frequently tend to underexplain concepts. Offering further clarification for your arguments, therefore, ranks top among the methods on how to lengthen an essay.
To do this, review how each thought in your work has been developed, and provide examples where you think an idea might be confusing. As a way to increase word count without adding unnecessary words to your writing, you could also include fresh evidence to back up your statements.
You should preferably get advice from your peers since they are not as invested in the essay and can more objectively assess your arguments.
- Including quotations in your work
If you condensed a quote in a portion of your work, think about expanding the phrase to more fully express the point you were trying to make. By doing so, you can increase the strength of your argument and the number of words in your essay without using filler words.
Keep in mind that block quotes longer than four lines are edited as separate paragraphs and are surrounded by quotation marks. Also, be careful to provide the appropriate in-text citations to fend off plagiarism accusations.
- Introduce new arguments
Another method I use to lengthen my essay is adding new thoughts that are relevant to the topic. for this, I recommend that you develop a reverse outline when rereading your paper.
The counterargument will help you identify the paragraphs containing two or more ideas so that you split and develop each idea in an individual paragraph. Also, consider how new arguments can be introduced into your work and address counterarguments to each claim made within your paper.
- Replace contractions with full words
In addition to being avoided in academic writing, terms like don’t and can’t reduce your total word count. By breaking up these contractions into separate words, you can increase your word count while avoiding the penalties associated with employing contractions.
- Spell out numbers
Spelling out numbers is a common approach how to make an essay look longer. In addition to following the formal guidelines for academic writing, writing numbers in words increase your word count without confusing the reader.
- Transitional phrase
Transitional phrases can assist you to add some words to the final word count. Transitional words don’t just make your essay longer; they also guide the reader through it and make it simpler for them to understand your ideas.
- Seek help from an expert
If you have run out of things to say to make your essay longer, consider seeking guidance from an expert. Experts can assist you to identify weak points in your work and offer fresh ideas to develop your argument because of their experience.
You may avoid typical errors in your work with the help of an expert, ensuring that you receive the highest possible grade for your writing.
What not to do when lengthening your essay
A basic search for “tricks to make your essay longer” turns up deceptive techniques to pretend to have more pages. But in light of your tutor’s expertise, these suggestions can backfire and lower your overall grade.
As you compose your essay, you should avoid doing the following things:
- Increasing the text size and spacing from the acceptable levels
- Including extraneous details unrelated to the subject.
- Squeezing the margins of the paper to make the words fit onto more pages than they might have been in the conventional format.
- Increase the size of the text of your paper’s header, footer, and other identifying elements.
