And this is your opportunity to shorten your essay dramatically. Sometimes you will find a whole paragraph in your essay that is repetitive and can be removed without the essay losing any meaning.

Write your paper according to the structure, but don’t forget to pay enough attention to the content. What aspect of veterinary medicine makes it a desired career for you? What skills/competencies do you have that will help you in studying?

Eliminating wordiness

When writing an essay, you may need to shorten your essay by reducing its word count to the number required by your instructor. In this case, you might have some words that you need to get rid of in the essay. Last week, a New York Times front-page story, “College Application Essay as Haiku? For some, 500 words Aren’t Enough,” delved into the issue, focusing on the Common Application’s new 500-word limit for the personal statement. The standard length of a high school essay is 300 to 1000 words. The suggested word count is not just about the size – it is a complexity barometer.

how to make an essay shorter

Use this tool if you exceed the word limit in your essay or a particular paragraph. If the essay assignment sets the final word count at 1,000 words and you use 200 words to form each paragraph, your essay will consist of five paragraphs. That gives you one introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs, and one conclusion paragraph. We already know that each essay paragraph will have between 100 and 200 words.

Real Ways to Make an Essay Longer

When you begin your essay, make a clear statement. Be able to back that statement up if necessary, but be prepared to argue for it in a strong sense. Avoid the sentence “I believe that X.” Instead, state a thesis to help the reader understand exactly how you feel and why.

how to make an essay shorter

It can be about a personal experience or an event that you witnessed. When writing a narrative essay, it’s important to use descriptive language to make the story come alive for the reader. There are many different types of essays you may be asked to write in school or as part of a standardized test. Each type of essay has its own structure and purpose. When writing essays, you need to know the differences between each type of essay and how to approach them. In the after, we cut a bit of the content fat, but the main idea is the same and remains just as powerful. When I first started writing my college essays, I thought 500 words was plenty of space.

Free Text Shortener Tool

I do my best writing when I have to edit myself and these ideas are good places for me to begin. I wish I could stay under my professor’s word count limits, but it never happens I guess it’s better than writer’s block, but it’s still an issue.

  • Check out our ways to stretch and condense your paper below.
  • Trim the fat.Some words commonly used in application essays contribute nothing to the narrative.
  • They give a mere summary of the body paragraphs when instead, you must tie them together and provide a broader context without sending the reader back.
  • Don’t be afraid to hit “Enter.” Numerous students are scared of dividing their text into smaller parts while writing.

Instead, use the active voice whenever possible, especially if it’s critical to know who or what acts. The traditional how to make an essay shorter college essay structure involves writing more general statements first and then adding more specific statements.

Tip #1: Shorten the introduction and conclusion

1) Use the search bar to find the times you have said ‘that’ because most of the time you don’t actually need it for the sentence to make sense. The best thing you can do for your writing is to learn to edit well. Ask someone else to read the paper and ask them what is unnecessary. Play with the paper margins, font size, size of the headers and footers, space between letters and space between lines. If your paper is double-spaced, switch it to .75 line between. Take out a quote or two or see if the quote can be shorter.

A quick video where my colleague, Eveyln, teaches students how to turn a passive sentence into “I” focused action sentence. Below you will find reasons why students love our shortening tool.

The list of references

Add information from your research sources to strengthen claims. Inserting 1-2 quotations or pieces of data from research articles shows that you’re aware of conversations surrounding your topic. The most complicated ideas can be stated in the simplest and most spare manner.

how to make an essay shorter

That sentence contains a lot of information that we can combine into a shorter passage. Some grammar and readability checking tools call a preposition-riddled sentence sticky or bogged down.

How to Shorten an Essay Without Ruining It

A research paper or essay is not a literary contest work. It is about conveying your ideas and substantiating them. The person reviewing your text most likely won’t read into it but quickly scan it through. Your purpose is to put your thoughts on paper with the minimum words. This is how you can do this without prejudice to the contents. Many people have a habit of writing a mini-summary at the end of each section and “reminding” them about it in the next one. This practice is redundant and wastes your time and word count.

  • Check out 10 More Ways to Reduce Your Word Count in Academic Writing.
  • How often do you exceed the word count by more than 10%?
  • Finally, you could also ask your teacher or professor for examples of concise essays they’ve liked in the past.
  • A good rule of thumb is that every time you begin talking about a new point or topic, start a new paragraph.

When we say “flow,” we mean rhythm and pacing—“trippingly on the tongue” (thanks, Hamlet!). Your words should flow through the admission officer’s mind too, and if possible, make them forget they’re reading.

Some Tips to Help Writing in a Concise Way

Here’s an example of word count distribution for a thesis or dissertation. Do you need to write an essay about your culture but don’t know where to start? I’m Constance, and I’ll show you how to write an essay about your culture…. So, look for these detailed examples in your essay and just summarize each of them into one short sentence. You may have heard that in essay writing, you are supposed to proceed from general to specific. Whether you stick to this rule really well in your essay or not, I want you to notice something.

Many students ask, “how can I reduce my word count? ” This task requires careful editing and content review so the process may take hours. We’ve compiled some handy tips to guide you in this process and hone your word-count-reduction skills. how many pages is a 1000 word essay Before you begin writing the essay, use an outline to plan out what you want to say in each of your paragraphs. Number your paragraphs 1–3 and jot down a phrase or sentence that sums up the major point you want to make in that paragraph.

I thought that being under was bad, but being over seems to be even more difficult. I’m not good at editing so it takes me so long to get under word count. Limiting the amount you can write is actually something that can help you write better. It forces you to clean up your writing and only make the most necessary points which will make it more concise and accurate.

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