So I Have a Problem

tape a bunch of the pages together

Remove superfluous stuff.
Spoilers:

Most worthless advice ever

Y'know, people always say this. They claim they'd rather have the problem of being too wordy than the problem they have, but really, it's less of a blessing than you think.

It's incredibly difficult to shorten something that you've but a lot of time and effort into developing. While it's easy to synthesize new points and expand on one's preconceived thesis, taking stuff out is hard because you're removing things that you may feel are integral to your argument.

tl;dr, adding is easier than taking out because you're not cutting sections that you feel are necessary to make your point.

Well, of course, unless you're in high school in which most cases teachers grade you more on the length of your paper than the actual content. It's pretty sad, really, that teachers are so lazy and unhelpful.

I swear, I BS'd so many essays in high school with complete garbage and teachers still gave me As because they were long and looked knowledgeable.

But here's what you do. First you cut out just enough to make it, put in a folder, write the name of the essay on the folder.

Then you make another folder with the unedited essay and label it "essay name - directors cut" and write exciting things as "2 entire never before seen pages." on it.

This post has been edited by DJ Elly on Sep 30 2009, 09:58 PM

Does the professor also specify how the page should be formatted ( typeface / type size / margin size / etc.)? If not, then what you did to shorten it would seem O.K. as long as it was obviously ("obviously"..... whatever....) legible.


or you could just

gfjghk

do you not sleep or something?

I...

I know how to write, dude.

Ffffffff!

It's supposed to be MLA format, which is pretty strict. Like I said, though, I already messed around with it a bit, now it's just a matter of editing it.

ohh I know that problem

never got to solve that ;_;

You reduced your point to about a third of it's original size perfectly right there.

By the way, I did manage to squeeze the essay down to just under 7 pages (i.e. 6 full pages, the maximum). I'm going to go turn it in to my professor's office sometime today.

My problem is that I'm just too lazy to write the essays in the first place. That must really suck though, it's so hard to shorten essays, especially when you've got into a writing groove.

> 2 pages too much

> 2 pages too less

SOLUTION:
Give 2 pages to SGG and you're both happy

use less syllables

go through a thesaurus and select a shorter version of every single word in the essay

Four hours a night.

find all the frequently used long world and replace most of them with short words with the same meaning.
If this isn't short enough, try using a thinner font.
After that, scrap one or two unneeded lines (make sure further lines doesn't refer to these, or remove the referring parts) and you're down to 4 pages.

wait, you have to stay within those limits?

I thought you could go over?

The problem is that frequently used words are usually short, I doubt there will be many long words that are frequently used in the essay.

I have this problem too! I'm trying to work on being more concise, it's just as much of a problem as not being wordy enough, but I still seem to end up a few pages or paragraphs over what I should be.

Hi welcome to college