Whether you’re writing a college admission essay or you’re up to putting an argumentative essay together, sticking to the required word count shows your professor that you read, understood, and paid close attention to the paper’s requirement.
However, hitting the word limit, and even going beyond if the topic demands, can be a challenge if you’ve already exhausted all ideas.
While it’s easy to become overwhelmed, or even freak out, in the process, there are simple approaches that you can take to hit the word count for an essay without scratching your head.
As you make your essay longer, you have to understand that it’s not just about putting words on the paper to reach the word limit.
Rather, your final draft should be quality, packed with great content, and be as relevant to the essay topic as possible.
Have a few hours left and don't know how to write that essay yourself? Our experts are here to write your essay for you.
So use the following tips to make your essay longer if the topic in question requires that you do so.
How to Make an Essay Longer Yourself: A Step by Step Guide
The best way to motivate yourself to write an essay by making it longer is by observing the following rules.
1. Use Expert Quotes in Your Essay, but Sparingly
A good way to make an essay longer is to include expert quotes in the paper, but do so only sparingly, as it’s not recommended to fill the document only with quotes.
Besides adding content to your work to hit the word limit, quotes prove that you did your research, agree with other writer’s ideas, and show your instructor that you know what you do.
Don’t just include quotes in your essay in appropriately. You can learn how to cite sources here.
2. Use Examples to Back Your Claims & Add Depth to Your Work
Every claim you make in an essay can be concise, easy to understand, and convincing if accompanied by relevant examples.
Adding instances doesn’t just make your essay longer. It also indicates that you did a bit more research to prove your claims while strengthening your arguments.
Don’t hesitate to use multiple examples if you want to, only make sure they’re relevant to the topic of your essay.
In fact, the more examples you add for each idea, the better, as it goes a long way to impress your instructor while making your paper longer.
3. Use Phrases and Words that Easily Transition Ideas
Transition words, if integrated correctly in writing, can make an essay interesting to read, easily grabbing the attention of your professor sentence after sentence.
Transition words takes a reader from one idea to the next, while easily hooking them to the essay altogether whereas they wouldn’t have continue reading the essay otherwise.
As you write, you’ll notice that you won’t more than likely use many transition phrases to lengthen the paper. Still, these play the role of adding to the word limit while making your ideas or concepts easy to connect.
4. Improve Your Essay's Introduction and Conclusion
The introduction of your essay is the most important section of the paper.
Not only should it be longer, to should also be a hook, with sufficient information that makes the reader to easily understand the topic in question.
Often, you’ll need to revisit the introduction more than once to come up with a piece that’s perfect for the rest of the assignment.
Read the introduction once again to see if you left out key information that, if included, will give your reader more insight and make your argument easy to understand.
Make sure your concluding paragraph doesn’t just summarize all the main points in the assignment but also give your reader the feedback/solution they should consider.
If the two, the introduction and conclusion hasn’t provided enough information, don’t hesitate to refine them.
5. Re-read Your Essay’s Prompt Again, See If You’re Missing Something
Read your essay’s prompt to see if there are details you may have left out when writing your essay.
Maybe you skipped a question by error. Maybe you didn’t answer a subtopic explicitly. Or maybe you didn’t back up some of your ideas with more examples to make your work more convincing.
When reading the prompt, a couple of questions to ask yourself may include the following:
When creating your first draft, chances are high you may not have included all the information as instructed.
This is your opportunity to do a bit more research, add more content to the essay to make it longer, but do so carefully to make sure the information you include is relevant and authentic to the topic in question.
6. Ask Someone to Help You Proofread the Essay
There’s no better way to know if your essay packs usefulness and value than asking a friend, a sibling, or a fellow student to proofread the work for you.
They’ll weed out parts that are either irrelevant or unclear. Then you can go back and revise the document, adding more information that enhance the clarity of your paper.
By adding more content after a friend helps you to proofread will enable you to provide a more comprehensive understanding of your topic, so it becomes easy to communicate a message to your audience.
7. Master and Use the Reverse Outlining Approach
Reverse outlining is a lot of work.
Involves creating an outline based on the work you’ve already written, easily allowing you to reorganize your thoughts in a way that not only makes your essay longer but also makes more sense to someone reading the essay.
As you reverse outline, you’ll figure out the parts that needs more refining/clarity, so you can do a bit more research and provide additional information that provides more clarity.
Some of your larger paragraphs may even have more than one idea.
Breaking them up into multiple paragraphs, and then providing additional information to further explain each idea will provide a more thorough explanation, while adding length to your essay.