Cutting down your assignment draft to stick to a word limit is one of the most agonizing aspects of essay writing. When you’re under pressure to make a goal that’s only a few hours away, this process can be even more distressing.
Writing simply is the secret to producing straightforward and concise material within the word limit. However, doing this effectively is a craft that cannot be mastered in a brief period of time before a deadline.
When you don’t have much time, minor adjustments to your college essay can help to meet the requirements. Here are a few easy tricks for rapidly shortening your text and meeting limits on words.
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Pay Attention to the Evaluation Guidelines
The marking criteria are the aspects that the teacher looks for when grading your college application essay (or any other kind of assignment). To find them, go to your course website and look for the section where your teacher has provided information about your assessment.
Keep in mind that teachers do not always provide marking criteria. If they have simply provided a college essay topic without the word count, it is likely that you must simply rely on the essay theme. If your paragraphs aren’t related to the topic (or other scoring criteria, if any), remove them to meet the limit on words.
Remove the Worst Paragraphs
Even if you go over the word count, you can always look through your draft and remove the worst-performing parts. Removing entire paragraphs guarantees that there are fewer portions of an essay that are dull, pointless, or unanalytical.
To determine which lines are the finest and worst, do the following:
- Remove the lines with the fewest or most references to shorten an essay. Teachers will skim a passage to evaluate the content of the sources in it. Paragraphs with insufficient citing, excessive referencing of a single source, or only citations of non-academic resources are immediately noted down by the instructor before they are even reviewed.
- Identify the passages that are the least persuasive. Teachers will penalize you for any passage that is not convincing or “watery”, so delete it and shorten an essay.
- Grade your lines on a scale of 1 to 10. Score each paragraph of your college essay out of ten. This will assist you in making the difficult choice of which pieces to remove to meet the word count.
- Merge two lines into a single one to follow the word count. At some point, any essay writer may like one phrase in a paragraph but dislike the rest. If this is the situation for you, try extracting excellent phrases from one paragraph and inserting them into another. Then you can remove the problematic words from the initial paragraph. If you do this, make sure that all lines still revolve around the same central idea – if you fail to disclose the topic, the word count doesn’t matter at this point.
Listen to Your Paper Read Out Loud
Hearing your paper read aloud can assist you in determining which chapters or phrases should be removed. Here are some considerations to bear in mind while listening to your college essay:
- If a sentence sounds too long and exhausting to listen to, it’s worth removing unnecessary words or rephrasing it.
- If a sentence sounds uncomfortable when spoken, it will sound awkward when read.
- If the paper appears to have lost focus on the subject, delete or revise that part to ensure it relates to the essay question.
Students often believe that lengthy, intricate sentences with fancy-sounding terms will get them good grades. In fact, the reverse is true, even if the work meets the word count requirements.
The read-aloud choice can help you see your work through the eyes of a listener. Take advantage of it by keeping an ear out for anything that sounds awkward, confusing, complicated, or exhausting. Immediately delete or reduce it. Remember that the aim is to have your essay shorter and more straightforward.
Other Tips & Tricks to Shorten an Essay
On the Internet, you may come across various pieces of advice on how to shorten an essay, like using a specialized paper writing service, for example. However, there is no need to pay someone to write your essay – there are some tips and tricks that will help you become a professional writer yourself!
Avoid Overusing Adverbs, Adjectives, and Other Modifiers
Adjectives modify nouns, and adverbs – verbs. However, excellent phrases do not require any changes.
The majority of modifiers (like adverbs and adjectives), in most cases, “weaken” the meaning of verbs and nouns, reducing the strength of your writing. To make your essay writing better and more concise, remove superfluous adverbs and descriptors. For example, instead of saying “The complete therapy lasted four days, and the drug significantly helped the patients’ health”, you can omit words in italics and write “The therapy lasted four days, and the drug helped the patients’ health”.
Also, terms like “possibly,” “some,” “often,” “occasionally,” “could,” “completely,” and others can make your work stand out, indeed. Nonetheless, these phrases may add to the length of your composition. And, in most cases, you can remove them without changing the general sense of your sentence.
Remove Wordy Phrases
Going through your entire essay and deleting unnecessary sentences can often save you hundreds of words and bring your essay back within the required word count. Avoid words and phrases that are overly descriptive, redundant, overly emotive, or written in the first person. They tend to convey the same message in far more words than necessary. For instance: the sentence “The bulk of cells died in reaction to drug treatment during the duration of the research” could be rephrased to “Most cells died after being treated with the drug during the research”.
Also, to write short sentences, refrain from using lengthy terms when short ones will suffice. For example, instead of “facilitate,” “investigate,” or “utilize,” merely write “assist,” “study,” or “use.”
The same applies to transition words. They can help keep your writing flowing and make your work easier to read and comprehend. However, some transitioning words (for example, “indeed,” “then,” and “finally”) can be easily removed.
Give Preference to Active Voice
The active voice implies fewer syllables than the passive voice. And using the active voice makes your assignment more clear and compelling, allowing you to express a more potent statement. Compare these two sentences: “The researcher gathered the materials” and “The materials were gathered by the researcher”. The former is obviously shorter and sounds more natural.
So, use the passive voice only when there are no other options or you want to somehow increase your word count.
Avoid Running Starts
Sometimes authors like to open a sentence with phrases like “there is/are,” “it is,” and “the thing is that,” thus avoiding the active voice and exceeding word limits. These sentences can be rewritten to make your essay shorter, more straightforward, and more concise. For example, use “The cells migrate slowly without the treatment,” instead of saying “It has been reported that the cells migrate slowly without the treatment” while writing essays.
Merge Sentences with Similar Meanings
To shorten an essay, make sure you communicate your ideas plainly and succinctly. Writing precisely and clearly will not only help you fulfill all of the requirements, but it will also make your draft simpler and easier to read. When proofreading your college essay, pay careful attention to repetitive phrases that focus on the same concept.
Furthermore, consider combining the meanings of two or more statements into a single sentence to express the same thing in fewer lines. Just make sure the concluding phrase isn’t too long or complicated. Because this will make your writing difficult to read and understand.
Re-listen to Your Essay Again
Once you’ve revised your essay and applied all the tips mentioned above to meet the word count, read your work aloud. Or use online services to listen to it again. Even if your essay’s word count is within the required range, there may still be imperfections. Revise active voice sentences, adverbs, wordy phrases, and adjectives again.
Conclusion
Making your essay shorter might be a nightmare at times. You can easily do this while improving your work by following the steps outlined above.
If you are a more advanced or ambitious student, you may find that you consistently exceed limits on words. This isn’t always a problem. Consider going over the word limit as a plus as it allows you to show only the best of your college application essay (or any other kind of work). You have the option of deleting anything that isn’t solely concentrated on getting marks.
Finally, your final submission will be more organized, simpler to comprehend, and easier to grade. Ideally, this will result in your scores increasing even more!