How to Add More Words to an Essay – A Handy Toolkit

You have finished writing your essay and suddenly realize that you are not meeting the word count requirement. “What can I do to fix this?”, you ask yourself. “How can I add more words to my essay? Should I rewrite a particular paragraph or make a new essay from scratch?”

Foremost, don’t panic! There are multiple easy ways to increase word count of your essay, and we’d be happy to share them all with you in this practical toolkit.

When faced with the challenge of expanding an essay to meet word count requirements, many students turn to assignment help services for guidance. These services can offer practical advice on enriching an essay without compromising its quality. From suggesting areas where additional detail could be beneficial to helping integrate relevant examples or counterarguments, assignment help can be invaluable in enhancing the depth and breadth of an essay. It’s important, however, to use such assistance judiciously, ensuring that any added content is relevant and maintains the integrity of the original argument. Ultimately, the goal should be to enhance the essay meaningfully, rather than simply adding words to meet a numerical target.

Why would anyone need to add extra words to an essay?

There could be multiple reasons why someone may desperately need a solution for how to add words to essay.

Most often, problems with word count occur because of bad planning, e.g., when someone writes an essay without a clear outline, or with a very vague one. Unless an outline encompasses the whole text, starting with the introductory part and finishing with the conclusion, the writing often leads to a shortage of volume. With bad planning, one may sometimes lack half the required word count or even more, missing up to one or two pages of text.

At the same time, even an experienced writer with good planning is not guaranteed to meet the word count on the first try. However, in this case, the mismatch is usually minimal, from a dozen to a hundred words, and it doesn’t take much time and effort to increase the word count.

In each particular scenario, the solution to how to increase word count on essay will be different.

How to add 100 words to an essay

The first and simplest scenario that we’ll review is when you need to add up to 100 words to your essay. In this case, a few fixes and quick solutions will do the job.

Add words and phrases to increase word count

By adding extra words and phrases that help to connect sentences or paragraphs, you can quickly and easily increase the word count of your paper. Such words and phrases are called transition words and phrases respectively, and they can be good, as well as bad.

Notice how the bad ones are jargon words, they carry little meaning, add no value, they hamper the readability and clarity of a text. While the good ones are mostly concise, they help to connect sentences, and in general, they are more common for academic writing.

Include definitions and explanations

If you have used a term or an abbreviation – explain or define them! You can also look into adding new terms and abbreviations if you think they fit the content and don’t ruin the flow of your story.

Use descriptive language

Review your existing words, phrases, and sentences to see if you can make them more vivid, bright, and engaging. This will not only increase the word count but also make you sound more persuasive. For example:

Include subheadings and chapter titles

If your essay allows, e.g., it has more than 5 paragraphs or it spans across 3 or more pages – consider adding subheadings and sections. They will slightly increase word count and give ideas on where you can add a sentence or two to expand your newly created sections.

How to add 200 words to an essay

To add 200 words to your essay, you’ll need more than just quick and easy fixes. Consider adding more evidence, elaborating on particular points, and analyzing and rewriting the existing content.

Add more evidence

Support your arguments by adding more evidence, such as powerful and reliable quotes, facts, statistics, research results, etc. If used wisely, this will enhance the credibility of your essay.

Elaborate on supporting points

Use a bit more eloquence and thoughtfulness when describing your points and arguments. To this end, consider extending the existing sentences with new ones or breaking them into two or more. For example:

Analyze and interpret

Don’t just provide dry facts. Explain them, analyze them, and interpret them to your best abilities. Take on your reader’s perspective and try to expand your points to give the reader what they want, i.e., what they’ll readily understand and believe. For example:

Rewrite and expand the existing sentences

Scan your text for narrow places that can potentially be expanded. Make sure that you don’t harm the readability and credibility of your essay, but rather make it more substantial and interesting.

How to add 300 words and more to an essay

A totally different scenario is at play when you need to add 300 or more words to your paper. Roll out your sleeves and get ready to do some serious writing.

Expand on your ideas

Carefully reread your essay to find gaps and opportunities to expand your existing ideas and thoughts. Can you elaborate more on some things? Is there anything you may have forgotten to say?

Use Examples

Examples are your best convincing points. If you can, add examples to your arguments. This may require you to insert extra paragraphs, as you don’t want the existing ones to look too bulky. For example (extra text is highlighted in blue):

Include counter arguments

In almost all submitted college essays, there is a lack of counter-argumentation. By addressing counter arguments, you make your work look complete and this, in turn, adds weight to its scientific value. For example (extra text is highlighted in blue):

Conclusion

We have reviewed several effective ways how to add words to an essay. Some solutions are easier to implement, they work fine for cases where up to 100 extra words are needed, but they are not as effective for a more serious extension work. Therefore, you should pick the ones that suit your writing style and formal word count requirements the most, as there is no fit-all recipe in things like creative writing.