10 Tips to Make an Essay Longer

Why would you need to make an essay longer? Funny question. It happens this way very often — you are out of ideas and words, and the essay is  far from what it needs to be in length. Some topics are just not made for long essays, everything can be easily told in a few abstracts and after that it is all just torture, as you need to come up with new “plot twists” and prove them with relevant citing. You cannot just trick your professor with adding extra long footnotes — they don’t count in the overall word count. Of course, we believe that you should first of all focus on writing better essays, nott just longer essays, but desperate situations call for creative measures, and we are ready to introduce you to some of them. 

Making Your Essay Longer: 10 Proven Tips

Professors are not stupid, they have seen it all, so all the tips like “make a spacing bigger,” “choose a larger font” come from people who haven’t written one academic essay in their lives (how is it possible?!). When you receive a task to write an essay, you also know exactly how many words it should be. It doesn’t matter whether these words are typed with 12, 18 or 72 font size, there still should be an exact number of words. In this article we will share with you only valid tips which actually make your essay longer — not just let it seem longer. Of course, you most probably won’t need all of them. Three-four for one essay will do. Don’t overdo it not to make your professor annoyed, remember, that no matter how much you try to trick them, they will still value substance over length and form.

  • Start with a detailed outline. Outlines are lifesavers, and if you are allowed (and sometimes you are) to add it to your essay, it is a great gift! Don’t overdo it, not to make things too evident. One page for outline is a necessity, it looks enough, and makes your essay longer. If you cannot include an outline into your essay, still, we recommend writing it. It will help you gather thoughts and come up with better ideas later.
  • Make your introduction stand out. Normally, introductions are rather brief, and you cannot make it longer just pouring some water without substance. Still, you can make your introduction stand out. How? Do allusions to similar topics and authors, ask questions, introduce preliminary arguments that you will uncover later in detail.
  • Add more arguments. Normally, they say that even two different arguments, positions, ideas are enough to write an essay, but we strongly recommend you to use more arguments to make your essay longer. Look for different points of view on the same matter, as even in science there are different positions. Different arguments come with lots of citations and counterarguments that help to make your essay longer.
  • Add more counterarguments. Well, once you have found more arguments, you need to add more counterarguments to balance them. Even if you are writing not an argumentative essay, you still need to present some ideas from different sides. Even a thesis statement is better when you state several opposing points. It creates intrigue for the entire paper. 
  • Use transitional phrases everywhere possible. Well, you know how to do it. Make sure that the usage of transitional phrases is very evident to professors’ eyes and don’t overdo it. You would not like to receive a worse grade for this trick, and it is completely possible as it can be marked as “lack of style.”
  • Make headings (when used) longer. If you are allowed to use headings and subheadings use “:” to make them longer. Every 5-6 words you add to every title, subtitle, subheading, work to make your essay at least a little longer. 
  • Spell numbers. It is just another trick that will help you to make your essay a bit longer, not too much, but every word counts when you are completely out of ideas, doesn’t it? 
  • Use quotes. It is a golden source for making your essays longer. Remember, there is a limit for quotes. In some styles it reaches 5% of the text, but as for our experience, professors say nothing if those take 7% or even a bit more.
  • Load on different citations. Use more citations. You can use different citations supporting one thought. This way you will add more authors’ names to almost each abstract. It can add at least 50 words to your essay.
  • Be as descriptive as possible. Describe terms, describe places, give a brief description of inventions and events when possible. Be creative and try to conceal what you are actually trying to do — don’t add descriptions to every abstracts and make sure they look as natural as possible. Finally, descriptive writing is one of the valid forms of academic writing and you should not be punished for using it to make your essay longer. 

How to Write Longer and Better College Essays

We gave you some tips on how to make your essay longer, but we didn’t focus on making it better. Well, of course, it requires another article or even ten of them, but here we can at least touch on this subject. The best advice we can give you here and now is this — if you are sure you cannot write a quality essay in a current situation (being busy, sick, overwhelmed), it is better to pay people to write essays for you, instead of trying to do everything on your own. 

Delegating some of your tasks to someone is more than normal — this way you make your schedule cleaner, can focus on more important tasks, while professional writers handle your academic load. Be careful when choosing a writing service, focus on the ones that have reputation in the market, offer a substantial set of guarantees and work 24/7. Your goal is to graduate on time without experiencing too many problems, and you should choose the most effective methods to reach those goals. 

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