Among all the characteristics of an essay or any other academic paper, the most frustrating thing for a student is the size requirement. Let’s face it – this part of the task is just pointless. We’ve been told that it’s much more difficult to put your thoughts on paper in a short form, than to write something big. Yet you still have to add a few, or even a few dozen extra pages of text just to fill the gap and make a paper longer. Now, the question is, if you have already written everything, answered all the questions and done all the research…
How to make an essay longer?
Let’s not ask the logical question “why?” and just stand up to the challenge. What you need is a bunch of words, big deal. It would be perfect if you could add text to each part of the essay proportionally to its size. For example, if you need to add 10000 words and you have introduction, main body and conclusion of 1, 3 and 1 paragraph accordingly, it would be wise just to add 2000 words per paragraph.
The following paragraphs will tell you how to make an essay longer, in terms of each part in order to see what exactly you can add and where. You don’t want the paper to be inconsistent, do you? For this reason exactly you need to know where extra text belongs and which one to use.
How to make an essay longer – Introduction
As you may understand, you can’t make it bigger than the main body. What you can change, though, is the scale. I’ll explain this with the following examples – let’s say you’re writing an essay on the WWI history. Try to see the difference in these two ways to start your introduction.
- a) WWI was one of the most bloody and terrible wars in the history of humanity. It was the breaking point of military technology, where cutting edge and deadly inventions popped up every month, turning the battles into massacres…
- b) Humanity has waged war for ages. Along with fire and wheel, the early humans also built tools to hit each other on the head and take each other’s caves or mammoth meat. Each war sent the parties back in terms of social development, but gave a huge boost to military tech…
Now think for a moment, which one will give you a better opportunity to make your essay longer. The point is, when it comes to introduction, scale works. Start from afar, start from history, go into details. Believe me, no one will ask why you’re not being specific, as long as you keep things interesting.
How to make an essay longer – Main body
Well, no one is restricting you to anything here. Basically, this is the part where you can fill the gap with anything close to the topic. Details, quotations of relevant people, additional unnecessary information about obvious things – they will all make your essay longer. The important thing here is staying within the topic. Let’s go through a small example again.
The sentence “Charles Babbage was the inventor of the first programmable computing machine” can be bloated into a paragraph. Let’s start with unnecessary, but relevant information:
“As the popular theory states, Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first programmable “computer”, was born was born at 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, London, England, on the 26 of December, 1791. His parents were Betsy Plumleigh Teape and Benjamin Babbage, who was a successful banker. Charles started his learning spree at the age of eight by attending numerous private schools and having tutors.”
Not a word that doesn’t belong to the text and yet we have 3 large sentences instead of one.
How to make an essay longer – Conclusion
Having added a few paragraphs to the other parts, it’s only logical that you can expand your conclusion a little to make your research paper longer. You can’t really be less specific here in favor of length, but there are still ways. For example, you can use a really large quotation. The good thing is, they are already written properly, being interesting and meaningful. Why not reinforce your conclusion with a saying that is relevant? Getting back to the WWI topic, you can choose from the sayings of hundreds of warmongers of old, someone who participated in the WWI, or a famous person of modern times, who said anything about it.
Another way to get the conclusion a bit more bloated is to take more of the original text from the main body and introduction – before you started expanding them. As the conclusion is just a reminder of the main idea, it won’t hurt to repeat it.
Looking for essay conclusion recommendations? Check out our guideline how to write a conclusion!