If you’re significantly below the suggested word count on an assignment, you’re not likely to get full marks. This is probably why so many people ask us how to make their essays longer.
However, if you need to increase the word count in a document, you need to be careful. Doing it badly could even lose you marks instead! To help out, then, we’ve prepared this quick guide.
What Not to Do
Before we explain the best way to boost your word count, we should take a quick look at the hazards involved. In particular, we should look at what happens if you try to pad out your writing by simply adding extra words and phrases (usually adjectives, adverbs and other modifiers).
The following would be suitable for an academic paper, for example:
In Dombey and Son, Dickens is ambivalent about industrialisation. The railways generated money and jobs, but they undermined traditional ways of life. Dickens therefore portrays trains as destroying people even while they enrich others.
We could pad this out by simply adding modifiers, increasing the word count. But if we do that, the passage becomes harder to read and loses its impact:
In Dombey and Son, Dickens is generally ambivalent about industrialisation. The railways generated lots of money and jobs, but they undermined traditional ways of life. Dickens therefore portrays trains as destroying people even while they enrich others in another way, demonstrating that he is ambivalent about industrialisation.
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This is longer (47 words compared to 34). But the highlighted words and phrases are just padding terms (i.e. they don’t add anything meaningful). The author also repeats themselves at the end of the passage, which is another common error.
The Right Way to Increase the Word Count
So, how should you increase the word count in an essay? The key is making sure that anything you add contributes to your argument in some way. Usually, this can be done by rereading your work and looking for passages you could expand. This might involve:
- Adding an example or quotation to support your point
- Explaining an argument in more depth
- Comparing and contrasting two ideas or points of view
For instance, with the example passage above, we could add a quote from Dombey and Son:
In Dombey and Son, Dickens is ambivalent about industrialisation. The railways generated money and jobs, but they undermined traditional ways of life. Dickens therefore portrays trains as destroying people even while they enrich others, describing them as ‘piercing through the heart of every obstacle, and dragging living creatures of all classes, ages, and degrees behind it’.
Here, by adding a quote, we not only support our point about Dickens’ attitude towards trains, we also increase the passage to a whopping 56 words! Doing this throughout an essay will therefore boost the word count in your work without resorting to padding.