Essay writing is pretty much an integral part of college life. Professors are always shooting new topics toward the students. While most students struggle with filling the word count, some struggle with the opposite! Yes, some students do struggle with too many words in their essays.
If you’re one of them and you’re not sure how to shorten it, let us help. In this post, we’re going to list steps that you can follow to logically reduce the word count on your essay.
How to Shorten Your Essay
There is a common misconception in the world that more is always better. If you think from a logical standpoint, it becomes pretty apparent that it’s not always true. For example, if you eat too much, it’s going to cause stomach trouble. Similarly, college professors don’t like over-the-top word count when checking essays.
But what is done is done. If you’ve gone over the specified word count, it might be harder for you to delete some of them simply because you’ve spent a lot of time and thought on them. Let’s see what we can do about it.
Step 1: Identify the 3 Worst Paragraphs
Even for professional writers, it’s sometimes hard to keep all the paragraphs consistent. Not all of them are going to read equally well. For college students, the same is true for the paragraphs. So, when you’re trying to shorten an essay, the first obvious step is identifying the worst paragraphs.
In an academic paper, paragraphs are not the same as creative content. Each paragraph in an essay must contain a claim and facts to justify the claim. It’s only normal for students to provide facts that are not as concrete as the others.
If your essay seems to have such paragraphs, mark them. Now, check the word count after removing them. Looks good? Congratulations! You’ve shortened your college essay!
Step 2: Remove Redundant Sentences
Sometimes, we tend to use more words to describe a concept than necessary. When writing, it feels natural because we’re providing more proof to solidify our claim. But at the end of the day, if the total word count of the essay goes over the limit, those concrete facts won’t help you out.
When you use the same conceptual discussion more than once, it’s known as redundancy. Remove them to shorten your essay.
Also, using the same prepositions, modifiers, and adverbs over and over leads to redundancy. There are many tools online that you can use to find the redundant terms in your essay. Remove them.
Step 3: Reduce Modifiers
In commercial content, using too many adverbs or modifiers is often seen as adding value to the content. It’s simply because when you’re trying to build a rapport with the audience, using words that we usually use in conversation is crucial.
It’s the complete opposite for college essays. Essays must be proved with facts and the sentences must be to the point. So, you can’t really use the same tone on an academic paper as commercial content.
The biggest culprit here is the adverb. Excessive use of basically, really, essentially, actually, often, occasionally, never, rarely, etc. will add to the word count, especially if it’s a relatively long piece to begin with.
Then, there are the adjectives. While adjectives are used to emphasize the characteristic of something or someone, adding too many of them will result in redundancy. Good, very, first, last, own, great, amazing, long, etc. are some common examples of adjectives that you might be using too many times in your college essay.
Step 4: Find Weak Areas by Listening
Believe it or not, listening to what you’ve written in the essay can help you find potentially weak arguments. It happens to the best of writers. If you’re not willing to read what you’ve read out loud, use a tool like Google Translate or Microsoft Word’s read-out feature.
Take notes of the areas you think are not aligning with the overall legacy of the essay. Once the narration is over, go over it and remove the arguments you marked.
If you’ve followed all the steps we’ve followed so far on this post, you should be on the appropriate word count. If not, we have the perfect solution in the next step.
Step 5: Hire Professional Essay Writers
Yes, you can hire essay writers on the internet to take care of the job for you. We’re one of the best in business and we take pride in being one of the cheapest too! Just because we’re offering our services at an affordable price doesn’t mean we compromise quality.
To verify our claim, why don’t you read the testimonials clients have posted on our website? All of our clients are students just like you.
We can deliver a high-quality essay in as little as 3 hours. As we’re very familiar with the structure and the overall “academic” tone of an essay, we can strictly stick to the assigned word count while keeping the discussion relevant.
