10 Tricks to Reduce Your Word Count in Academic Writing

If you’re writing an in-class essay and don’t have time to perform any research, you don’t need to incorporate outside sources. But, it will impress your teacher if how long are essays you quote from a reading passage or bring up pertinent knowledge you may have gained during the class. I’m Dr Anna Clemens, a scientific writing coach and editor.

how to make your essay shorter

If you’ve completed the previous steps, writing won’t be hard. You have an outline, you have sources you’re going to use, now just follow the former and add the latter!

Dont Hesitate and Try a Word Shortener Right Here

We provide editing services and professional development programs for biomedical and clinical researchers. When dealing with page limits, a great trick to gaining an entire line is attacking paragraphs with “dangling words,” also known as widows or orphans.

  1. Look for paragraphs with just a few words at the end and focus on how you can shorten them to gain an extra line of space.
  2. For example, the usage of active voice instead of passive can significantly help you with that.
  3. Highlight the main plot elements and characters that are crucial to the story.
  4. Summarizing is an essential part of academic writing.
  5. It will work just fine with the three remaining supporting points.
  6. Instead, you want to find small but significant ways to bring down your word count.
  7. Some may cause more pages, and some may create a more elusive outcome.

If you write the essay without outlining, the essay will be poorly organized. If you have any questions about the topic, ask your instructor. If your essay doesn’t respond to the prompt, you likely won’t receive full credit. Another option is to use the “Track changes” option if you work in Word. This is what I use when commentary example I review documents for the students inside the Researchers’ Writing Academy so they can quickly see what has been cut or changed. And then, if you must, consider moving things to supplementary material. This is the last option assuming you were mindful in deciding what to put in the main paper in the first place.

Free Text Shortener Tool

Find only one core thought – this is the basis of the text. Then look for supporting points that revolve around this idea. At this stage, you can list the essential ideas in the text. Stipulate how long can an essay be the number of sentences you want to have in the resulting text. 4) This tip works particularly if you are writing a history essay, I always just say ‘America’ instead of ‘the USA’/’the US’.

We are an online custom writing service to provide products tailored for customers to use in their own way. Needless transitions can be “furthermore”, “then”, indeed”, “however”, and so on. When it comes to adjectives, they do not add meaning to the sentence and therefore they are unnecessary. This is a very practical technique for making your essay shorter. When given an essay to complete, the instructor expects you to come up with a topic and support it throughout your essay. However, if you still want to include all the points, then you can minimize the details, especially within weaker points. Like any piece of word shortener, the output from software needs to be treated with care.

Ways on How to Shorten a Sentence To Be Clear & Easy to Read

Reading the essay out loud often helps, as you’ll be able to hear sentences that aren’t quite coherent. If you’re writing about current events or journalism topics, read articles from well-known news sites like CNN or the BBC.

  1. In most cases, adjectives and adverbs weaken strong nouns and verbs, thus weakening your overall writing.
  2. They unnecessary when you want to make an essay shorter.
  3. Prevent it by proofreading your essay; if possible, check it with grammar checkers.
  4. One of the most common questions students ask when writing an essay is, “how long should an essay be?” The answer to this question is not always st…
  5. In addition, it follows a specific structure that can either be five paragraphs or three paragraphs.
  6. Check out 10 More Ways to Reduce Your Word Count in Academic Writing.

A short essay also has a shorter deadline, mostly in hours or within a day, except for the admission essays. The word “that” is used to introduce defining relative clauses. The defining relative clause cannot be removed without altering the meaning of the sentence. The word “which” is used to introduce non-defining relative clauses. The non-defining relative clause can be removed without altering the meaning of the sentence. Fortunately, there are easy ways of how to write a short essay.

Tips

But some transitions (e.g., indeed, then, furthermore) can be deleted with ease. When you have little time to spare, small changes to your text can add up to the space you need. Here are a few simple tricks you can use to quickly tighten your text and meet the limit. Overused phrases in a company or industry lose all meaning. So, if you’re writing how long is a mini essay about Death of a Salesman, an article about symbolism in Arthur Miller’s plays would be useful. But, an article about the average cost of Midwestern hotels in the 1940s would be irrelevant. However, if you’re writing an essay for a timed exam, it’s okay if you don’t have enough time to combine multiple drafts before the time runs out.

However, you do not need to connect every sentence with the previous one using a conjunction. Read through your manuscript and see if you can delete some “and”’s, “then”’s, “furthermore”’s, “whereas”’, “also”’s and “while”’s. I have noticed that certain non-native speakers (Germans, I’m talking to you!) tend https://cepadcapacitaciondocente.com.ar/2022/12/29/vfw-awards-sayville-teen-for-his-what-makes/ to overuse conjunctions. It assumes you have at least a few hours before the deadline and nothing more pressing to do than shortening the paper. Over the years I have been surprised by how often folks start by thinking about what content to remove , instead of trying to say the same thing in fewer words.

Be careful with modifiers, qualifiers, adverbs and adjectives

Hence, seven to eight pages should be the answer if you’re wondering how long is a 2000 word essay. Students are often sure that their short essay writing is flawless, but they are still likely to have made some mistakes. Typos can be nasty, and if someone has just finished http://www.storahjartat.se/2022/10/06/how-to-reference-journal-articles-in-apa-format/ writing an essay, these small issues might be easily overlooked even during re-reading process. That’s why it’s better to entrust your text to online grammar checkers. Another option entails using EduBirdie’s editing and rating services so you wouldn’t miss anything.

I never seem to be able to stay under the assigned word count on my essays. I found that one of the best ways to reduce the amount that I write is to take the time to outline before I even start writing. If I outline and I see that the outline is too long, I know my writing is going to be long.

Simple Ways to Improve Sentence Structure In Your Essays

Conclusion isn’t a simple summary of work, it’s synthesis. You must reply to the question raised back in introduction.

How can I make a 200 word essay longer?

  1. Add Examples. Skim through your essay looking for any place you have used an example to make a point.
  2. Address Different Viewpoints.
  3. Clarify Statements.
  4. Find Additional Sources.
  5. Use Quotations.
  6. Rework Introduction and Conclusion.
  7. Page Count.

Sometimes you will find a whole paragraph in your essay that is repetitive and can be removed without the essay losing any meaning. Repetition can be found on all levels – in a sentence, in a paragraph, or a section. When you reduce or eliminate repetition in your essay, you are making it less redundant. “Redundant” just means repetitive and therefore useless. Notice that it is pretty obvious that to cut out 200 words from an essay will make it shorter. Therefore, stating that you want to do it “to make it shorter” is unnecessary. In this tutorial I will show you four easy ways to shorten your essay by as much or as little as you wish.

Use active voice instead of passive voice

It’s as much of n issue for me is not having enough words is for you. I hate it when people dismiss problems of others jus because it happens not to be a problem for them. Try to say the same with fewer words by combining the meaning of two sentences and merging them into one. Just make sure that the final sentence isn’t too long because long complex sentences will make your essay difficult to read. When editing your essay, you can see more or less specific information, and the most specific elements of your essay are examples. A student who’s writing an essay should come up with the right logical structure, figure out what types of evidence you’re going to use, choose an appropriate style, etc. Besides, all this hard work may lead to a moment of frustration.

When you repeat certain words many times in a sentence or paragraph, it may seem like a good idea at first glance. These types of words don’t add anything useful so they should be deleted whenever possible to make your content more concise. Filler words are the “unnecessary” words that are used to make a sentence sound more eloquent, but they don’t actually add any meaning or substance. Break up large chunks of text into smaller paragraphs with just one main idea per paragraph.

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