When you want to make your essay seem longer...

Do you prefer to make the font size slightly bigger, or make the margins slightly narrower? Typically increasing the font size by between .5 and 1 makes the paper longer without being too noticable, or increasing the margins by a very small amount works too. Or do you do a combination of the two? Or some other methods, such as making the periods bigger, having the spaces between lines slightly bigger (2.1 instead of double spaced) or inserting 3 spaces after a period instead of two?

Personally, I like to use Arial font size 12, which is bigger than Times New Roman 12, and the teachers don't care because Arial is a standard font. I've also increased the size of the punctuation marks and used 3 spaces instead of 2 after periods.

My teachers don't fall of that stuff... and most of my papers are based on word count... so...

I make sure ALL of my contractions are written out like instead of saying "I've" I'll say "I have"... and I'm really good at making one word into a phrase to increase my word count.

What about word count? Lol.
Shouldn't contractions always be written out in academic writing?

I just got a mental image of your essays Epsi .. 4 words on a side of A4 with MASSIVE spaces between them. Now that would take balls to hand in hehe.

they should. but you'd be surprised how many people in my school overlook that.. including teachers.

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Originally Posted by Damage

they should. but you'd be surprised how many people in my school overlook that.. including teachers.

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Damn. Teachers should probably know that sort of stuff lol

Use as many words as possible :P

I just repeat stuff...or give another example even if I gave like 5 examples in the last paragraph. Seems to work for me.

But larger font and narrower margins don't usually work for me - more often than not, we email our professors the papers so they'll know what font you're using, font size, margins, etc.

I don't fake my essay length :)

I mean, I went to school for Literature, so they actually cared about these things - and, yes, they would notice if you did things to make your essay seem longer than it actually was. And, yes, the people who graded my papers did care about contractions o_O

If you're not at a specified word count/length, then write more (without being repetitive or useless). Usually my teachers didn't care if you were somewhat under the requirements (though there was usually a range; for example, 6-8 pages or something, and it's usually good to get within it) if you wrote a good enough paper. I'd written plenty of papers with the minimum length and no one ever cared.

They would care if, say, they were grading the papers, and come across yours - which looks drastically different than the 20 other papers they just graded - and roll their eyes at the obviousness of what you're doing o_o

If you didn't write the required length, then own up to it and don't use silly tricks to "cover it up" (which don't usually work). The teachers I had would definitely have preferred a minimum length paper than one that pretended to be longer than it was. Most teachers have taught for a while, and seen all the "tricks" in the book. You probably aren't doing anything they haven't seen before.

*shrug*

I personal just BS some of it, I add in information that is related but not really needed to help my paper.

Like right now I have to write a 5 page paper on my Management style for a class Im going to throw in my own alot of my own thoughts and opinions and crap about my major to help move it along :P