How to Make an Essay Longer

Regardless of where you study and what is your major, you will have to write quite a number of essays throughout your school and college years. Writing an academic paper, including an essay, suggests following particular guidelines. The guidelines include not only formatting style (font, margins, headers, etc.), but also limit you in terms of your essay content. You have to select thoroughly what information you put in your essay, and it leaves you wondering how to make an essay longer. Even when your essay topic is particularly exciting to you and you feel like you have a lot to say, you may still find yourself lacking on the word count. You have said everything you wanted to say, but your draft is still too short and you need to find a way how to make the paper longer and keep it informative and exciting to your reader. If such problems are familiar to you, then you are welcome to read on to find out how to lengthen an essay and achieve the necessary word count with ease and without making your writing boring and repetitive.

When we explain how to write a long paper, we talk specifically about how to make an essay longer word count, and not about ways to make a paper appear bigger – such as increasing the font, the spacing, the margins, adding wordy headers and footers, etc. No serious writer will allow him- or herself to expand their texts by such obviously fraudulent means so these ways cannot be regarded as sure methods how to make a paper longer. At the end of the day, only word count matters, so we would like to focus on how to make an essay longer word count. In this article, we set out to answer the questions - how to extend an essay without going too wordy or irrelevant? How to keep it both informative and exciting to read? We have collected some of the most effective recommendations on how to make an essay longer, and following them should facilitate your writing process a great deal.

PROVEN ADVICE ON HOW TO WRITE LONG ESSAYS

Conduct an additional research

No paper can be written without prior research. Before you sit down to write any essay, you have to conduct a thorough research. This is the only way on how to write long essays and make them worth reading. If you have conducted a research and are still wondering how to write long essays, then maybe you can research some more and find more relevant information to put in your essay or, at least, get some more food for thought. Additionally, a thorough research will help you make sure that all the information in your essay is both relevant and up to date. A well-done research will generate a lot of information that one can consider including in his or her paper and no longer sit wondering how to write long essays. So, some extra research will be beneficial in general not only for finding ways how to write long essays.

Put together a detailed outline

This is another safe way to make sure your essay has a proper word count before you even sit down to writing so that you don't have to worry about how to add words to an essay. You can start creating a thorough and detailed outline for your essay as you research. In your outline, you can formulate all the major points that you want to talk about in every paragraph and then simply dwell upon them. Here, it is better to put these major points in a particular order – from more interesting and important ones to the less.

Having a detailed outline helps you to know what you should write at all times throughout your work on an essay without getting stuck in a writer's block. With a good outline, you will never find yourself procrastinating and pondering about how to make your essay longer.

Add supporting evidence

This is a sure way how to make a paper longer. You discuss your points in a more detailed manner and give more evidence to make your argument well-substantiated. Of course, while doing in, you have to keep in mind the type of essay that you are to submit and what your teacher expects to see it your paper. In general, however, an extra evidence is never a bad thing for an essay.

HOW TO LENGTHEN AN ESSAY OF A PARTICULAR TYPE

As a student, you know that there are different kinds of essays that you may have to write. So, if you find yourself wondering how to make an essay longer or how to write long essays, there can also be tips specifically for particular types of essays:

Narrative essay

A narrative essay is the kind of essay where you tell a story about an experience. The experience does not have to be your own, it doesn’t even need to have actually happened in real life, so you can enjoy your freedom of creative expression. When writing a narrative essay, your goal is to produce an exciting read, and this is all you have to keep in mind if you think about how to make your essay longer. You can use jokes, give some insight into an issue, tell a story within a story, etc. Merely mentioning an incident does not constitute a good narration anyway, so you have to give as many details as possible to make your read more captivating. You can add backstories, opinion pieces, descriptions, etc., and you will see how you achieve the expected word count without even stopping to think how to make essay longer.

Argumentative essay

Argumentative essay is the kind where you pick a polarizing topic, pick a side in the debate, and prove that your standpoint is correct and the contrary one is incorrect. Importantly, you cannot use any emotional language, you can only use facts and logic to make your point. Thus, the first most obvious way how to add words to an essay of this kind is to give more evidence. All the evidence needs to be there for a reason so you can go into detail explaining why this or that piece of evidence is relevant to your argument and what exactly it proves. Another suggestion on how to make an essay longer is to expand upon the arguments of the opposing side before you effectively rebuke them.

Expository essay

An expository essay is the kind of essay that leaves the writer procrastinating and wondering how to write a long paper arguably most often. In these essays, you have to inform your reader on the subject, i.e., expose it. You reader expects nothing but information in such an essay, no opinion pieces, no arguments, etc. So, in such an essay, you can only describe dry facts. You can expand the word count of your expository essay by explaining in detail where certain data comes from so that your reader did not get the idea that you made up some of it. Basically, you not only add volume to your paper but also credibility. This is crucial since your reader is your professor who is surely extremely well-informed on the subject and will surely pick on an unreferenced piece of information. An expository essay should also leave no room for doubt, so if any information exists that counters your facts, it should also be noted, and you have to explain why your facts are still correct. Doing this will surely help you reach and exceed your suggested word count, and you will not have to worry how to make an essay longer.

Review

A review is an analysis or an evaluation of something. You can review a book, a movie, a service, and organization, etc. Reviews are needed for an inexperienced reader to make up their minds about the things that they are not yet familiar with. Their practical value can lie, for example, in the potential customers understanding better whether or not they want a particular product or service, or whether they should refrain from purchasing it. A review has to be of considerable volume, so when writing one, you should also take care of how to make a paper longer.

You can expand the volume of your review by presenting other people's opinions about that what you are reviewing. You can use direct quotes or be more subtle. It is a relatively easy way to gain more word count because these are opinion pieces, and you don't need to worry about staying objective at all times. If you think that it will make your review seem biased, you are wrong. Quite the contrary, adding opinions of real-life people will bring you closer to your reader. Moreover, these comments can (and must) be presented as the evidence to support your conclusion about whatever it is you are reviewing. The number of such opinion pieces per one review can hardly ever be overwhelming, so how to lengthen your essay should be the least of your concerns here.

Other essays

If you are tasked with other types of writing than any of the above, you are probably still wondering how to make an essay longer. Fortunately, we have some more practical advice on increasing the word count of your writing so that you never again have to find yourself stranded and asking how to lengthen your essay.

You can have a second pair of eyes give your draft a fresh look. For example, you can ask someone of your family or fellow-students look through your writing and see what they have to say about it – which points can be expanded or clarified. It is easy to overlook some major points when you are re-reading your draft yourself – you can see some points as self-explanatory or obvious, but your peer will not. Of course, it is still your essay, and other people's comments should be taken critically, but they can still serve as a valid source of inspiration on how to make essay longer.

If you are completely out of ideas on how to make an essay longer, as a last resort, you can write about something slightly off-topic and explain how your topic is connected to other topics within the same subject. You can also specify directions for further discussion on your topic by suggesting some related themes that, according to you, need more scrutinizing.

An experienced writer never raises the question - how to make an essay longer? If you follow our recommendations as you practice your writing, you will also forget this annoying question once and for all. You will have plenty of ideas about how to extend an essay, and you will be able to focus on the quality of your writing exclusively, without troubling yourself over its quantity.