Writing the Proper Amount of Essay Words
Monday, July 26th, 2010
How to keep the required essay word count
One of the first questions you should ask yourself before starting to plan an essay is how many essay words are you supposed to write. When requested to write an essay, you don’t always get to choose the extension. Sometimes, it is up to the students to decide whether they want to write a long essay or a short essay (and both of them have their challenges). But sometimes is the examiner the one that provides the essay word count. Here are some tips that will help you match their expectations.
How exact should the word count be?
As a student you are surely familiarized with this terrible feeling: you thought you had written the best essay, with quotations, references, many examples and a great conclusion with plenty of new ideas. But somehow, as you check the essay words in your textbook processor, you despair when you find out you have written only a small fraction of the 4000 words you were supposed to write. Or, on the contrary, you find your essay way too long, and you feel you have wasted your time writing all those extra essay words. Do you have to start all over? How important is the amount of words, really?
Well, in any given essay, if the requested word count was 2500 words, you may as well write 2400 words, or 2600. A hundred more or less won’t change your final essay mark. But that doesn’t mean you are allowed to write a much briefer –or a much longer- 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. And instead, writing too much can mean the student isn’t able to properly synthesize their ideas.
Making your essay longer
An essay word count below required always leaves a bad impression. So, if you need to add some essay words, you may try one of these tips:
- Extend the quotations: in this way, you write more words without actually thinking them!
- Write a longer introduction or conclusion: here you are allowed to paraphrase other parts of the paper. Use plenty of synonyms to avoid repetitions.
- Secondary information: write some secondary ideas and add them to the final version of the essay.
Making an essay shorter
Writing more essay words than required is not as bad as a very short one. But in any case, you are not exactly following the task if you write one page too many. So you’d better limit your paper following these directions:
- Make indirect quotations: don’t copy a two paragraph quote of a certain author when you may quote them indirectly by writing something like “As Foucault wrote, ….”.
- Cut down the introduction and the conclusion, here you are not providing the reader with information they can’t find someplace else.
