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

[Dess]

The hardest part imo is starting the paper. once you get the ball rolling, I can write more and more without paying attention to how much I've written.

Yeah that's the hardest part for me too... Once I actually get motivated to start writing I can crank out a paper pretty fast. I've written so many of them while talking in IRC that it isn't even funny anymore... lol.


Our teachers have a proof reader, and a plagiarism checker they use. They're available to us to check our work, but I honestly think they just send them through there without even reading most of our papers. The proof reader catches most of the contractions and stuff like that.. it's actually pretty damn useful, but yeah... if you knew some of the people in my class... you'd see why they grade so loosely. I'm trying to transfer out... I'm sitting pretty with a 3.85 when most of the work I've turned in should have gotten me no better than a C.

[RaiDae]

First; HAHAHAHAHAHA I've only got one essay to write this whole semester hahaha (yay for practical subjects - lab reports instead. But tbh... they can get quite hard :S)

Secondly; Seem longer?!!? i spent high school perfecting making it look as if i'd written less... We always do things by word counts. It must be over the minumim but less than the max. I was nearly always over the max... for a 1,500 word essay I remebering doing 3700 words.... It took me longer to shorten the essay than it took to write it.

thirdly; Add in more waffle. Waffle about things related. Keep waffling. Don't stop waffling till you think that looks like quite a good waffle.

lastly; it's quality not quantity.

[Dess]

First; HAHAHAHAHAHA I've only got one essay to write this whole semester hahaha (yay for practical subjects - lab reports instead. But tbh... they can get quite hard :S)

Secondly; Seem longer?!!? i spent high school perfecting making it look as if i'd written less... We always do things by word counts. It must be over the minumim but less than the max. I was nearly always over the max... for a 1,500 word essay I remebering doing 3700 words.... It took me longer to shorten the essay than it took to write it.

thirdly; Add in more waffle. Waffle about things related. Keep waffling. Don't stop waffling till you think that looks like quite a good waffle.

lastly; it's quality not quantity.

Funny you mention "waffling"... I wrote an entire paragraph on pancakes in the middle of an essay once... I got bonus points. But again... That was from the same teacher who let me bring Guitar Hero to class and counted it as our final... If you didn't participate, you got a 0. :P ( he was playing on expert times 3 speed the entire time and is by far the COOLEST teacher EVER, he pwned me at Reach a few weeks ago... Lol )

[Diligence109]

on contractions - there are professors that care about those o.o in college, at least. I could see it sneaking past high school profs here and there no problem

In high school, there were totally some papers I faked with some 12pt Arial and margins I bumped in about .1". The story changed completely at college...

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.

I've written good papers under the limit and gotten good grades because the paper filled out what it was expected to in fewer words. The professor even preferred it this way; that I write a paper that was actually good while not letting the guideline of a page limit force me into trashing the paper with bull****.

But it wouldn't be surprising if the story sang a different tune when you moved from high school to community college to private college to university with notoriously prestigious writing program...