Guide: How to Extend Your Term Paper/Essay

Here's trick I learned that can help you extend your essay. Its helpful for students that need to right a specific number of pages, but are unable to reach that limit.

Many people have tried to make their margins larger, or changing the font size, but most teachers put a specific margin size and a specific type of font.

The way to do this is to change the font size of periods. You might think that making your periods bigger serve no useful purpose, but trust me they can extend your essay by a half page or more.

To do this:

1. Open Microsoft Word.
2. Click Edit, Find (Ctrl + F).
3. Click on the Replace Tab.
4. Insert periods in both boxes as shown below.

5. Highlight the first period and click more.

6. Click Format, Font and make the period size 12.
7. Highlight the second period. Do the same thing as above, but make the period size 14.
8. When you finish, make sure the top is 12 and the bottom is 14.
9. When you finish, click Replace All. A message will pop up saying, how many period changes it made.
10. After you are done, you should notice that your paper has been extended.
The longer your essay, the more periods you will have, so your essay can be made much longer.


Note: Some teachers might consider this to be cheating so do this at your own risk.​

 

Wow this really helped me hehe as im not to bright when it comes to essays that are long xD

 

Clever! You could do the same with commas as well, I suppose?

 

You can also try spacing between the characters. it helped me all the time... just dont make it obvious. its very subtle but works

 

I tend to put an extra line from the top to where I start typing (before you start typing on a new page, push enter) No teacher has pointed anything out to me yet and it really helps when your doing 5+ pages.

 

Another way to quickly add extra lines is to deliberately create 'widows', where the last word goes on a new line by itself. This is easily done by adding in an extra unnecessary word in your sentance somewhere or swapping a short word with a longer one that pushes the last word over.

I'm a qualified proofreader so I naturally hate widows and orphans and I am paid well to remove them but it could be a good way to pad out your essay

Another little known one is to use 2 spaces after a full-stop (sorry, I'm British!), while strictly only a typists rule, I doubt it would frowned upon within the educational system.

 

Nice guide, although with my teachers they usually say it has to be a minimum of X words so it doesn't really help me out. Also, if you do this, it wouldn't be significantly noticeable as it's just the periods that are a tad bigger.

 

The main rule with getting extra words is to not use any shortened words like 'isn't', 'wouldn't' etc, type them out in full to gain a few more words... 'is not' 'would not' (also improves the general grammatical look of your essay and sounds much more intelligent).

Don't forget to put your name, school, class, date etc at the end - that'll be at least 10 more words :arf:

 

sure, stuff like this may help you scrape the pass mark as teachers will acknowledge you've completed the essay, but your essay itself won't address the argument any better from this.

 

and don't forget the short paragraphs!

 

OMG I do this all the time.
I tell all my friends this and they adore me haha.
Its such a great little trick and no professors can ever tell

 

This method mainly increases the spacing of your text. It's pretty noticeable when compared to a normal essay.

My teachers usually require that my essays are double-spaced, so this trick brings my spacing to around ~2.15. Just as a precautionary: putting your essay next to a normal double-spaced essay accentuates the difference.

 

Wow thanks alot.

This is really gonna help me when I have to write a 10 page essay for my school in senior year.