The Challenge of Writing a 3000 Word Essay

3000 word essays must be well organized

When writing essays, students don’t get to choose the extension of their paper. It is up to the teacher to decide the essay word count. And many times, as students we may need to deal with the challenge of writing a really long one, such as a 3000 word essay. Even if at first the number of required words or pages frighten you, don’t freak out. Actually, sometimes the difficult thing is writing a significant short essay. In fact, such long essays allow you more freedom and extended quotations: and that means writing many words without actually having to think them!

Is 3000 really 3000?

As a student you must be surely familiarized with this awful feeling: you thought you have written the perfect essay, with quotations, references, many examples and a great conclusion with lots of new ideas. But somehow, when you check the word count in your textbook processor and you find out you have written only a small fraction of the 3000 words you were supposed to write. Do you have to start all over? How important is the amount of words, really?
Well, in such a long essay, you may as well write 2900 words, or 3100. A hundred more or less won’t change your final mark. But that doesn’t mean you are allowed to write a much briefer essay. If you consider it from the teacher’s point of view, a student who was required to write a certain amount of words, but anyway writes less, must be because he or she has very little to say… No matter if the essay itself was good.

Organization is a must!

Good 3000 word essays should be well organized. This means writing an essay sketch or plan. But even before that you need to choose a topic (what are you going to write about).
Once you get to write, remember you should always start your essay (and your plan) with an introduction, that delimits your field. Then establish your hypothesis and your research methodology. The next step is starting the plan by writing subtitles.
Once you have the 3000 word essay planned, it is time to start writing it. Take into account the 3000 words you need to write and fill in the subtitles, completing them with information. And remember that any good essay should finish with a conclusion, so save some words for it. We know everything and more about building a strong essay structure

Extending a 3000 word essay

If you feel you’ll never reach the appropriate word count on your own, follow these tips. Try extending the quotations: instead of quoting a sentence, why not quoting the whole paragraph? Another good idea is writing a longer introduction or conclusion, since in these sections of your essay, you are allowed to paraphrase other parts of the paper. Remember to use synonyms to avoid repetitions. Finally, you can always rewrite some secondary ideas you left behind in the essay plan and add them now to the final version of the essay.

Tags: 3000 word essay, essay plan, long essay, organization