How do I decrease apprarent essay length?

October 3, 2006 1:43 PM

What are the most subtle ways to decrease the apparent length of my Word document?

I am writing an essay that should be no more than two pages in length, double-spaced. What I've written goes well beyond that in Times New Roman 12 point font. What tips do you have for decreasing the amount of page space that my text occupies? I don't want it to look particularly cramped.

I'm willing to:
-Decrease font size to 11 (10 is too small)
-Decrease the margins
-Change fonts (though the new font should be comparable to Times New Roman in terms of professionalism and readability)

What are your suggestions?

posted by VillageLion to writing & language (40 comments total)

Edit ruthlessly.
posted by raedyn at 2:02 PM on October 3, 2006

What Raedyn said. you can be subtle in cutting a page off of a 30 page paper. But you're already down to two. Subtle will get you a line or two.

Don't forget that your grader will be reading 30, 50, or 100 of these things. The ones that bend the rules stand out. It's not tricky to hold two next to each other and compare font sizes, or hold them up to the light in front of each other to compare spacing and margins.

I know two pages is not enough. Your professor knows that too, that's why he assigned it. The point is to cut to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible. You're not tricking him.
posted by kingjoeshmoe at 2:07 PM on October 3, 2006

1.75 spacing is a godsend (well, I generally used 2.2 to make a paper subtly longer, so I assume 1.75 is equally as subtle).

Decrease upper and lower margins to as small as possible. Get rid of any headers, except for one line for name and title. reduce the side margins to .5 inches or smaller. Times New Roman is a pretty small font - if this still isn't small enough, then perhaps you should either revel in your length or follow raedyn's advice.
posted by muddgirl at 2:08 PM on October 3, 2006

Experiment with line spacing. At 11 points, you may be able to get away with 1.5 spacing instead of double. And I defy anyone to see a difference between 1.7 and double.

You can condense your character spacing by as much as .5 of a point.

You can reduce the size of your paragraph indent to .25 or even .2.

You can turn hyphenation on.

As a last ditch effort, you can combine two paragraphs into one.

But, to be perfectly honest, what you really need to do is to condense what you've written -- cut and rewrite until you lose some of the bulk.
posted by La Cieca at 2:10 PM on October 3, 2006

Turn on hyphenation, decrease letter spacing (i.e. kerning), shrink headers and by-lines. Change to a font which is more dense.

But in the end, all of this is avoiding the real problem.
posted by clord at 2:11 PM on October 3, 2006

I think the things that you're willing to do are all going to out your paper as not meeting the requirements. I'm guessing this is some sort of University assignment, and let's just say that anyone who grades written assignments on a regular basis is wise to this sort of trick. When you've got a stack of papers with MS-Word default margins, the paper with different margins, well, sticks out. Not that every professor (or more likely, TA) is going to notice, but I don't think hiding in plain sight really works in this kind of situation.

So, in short, brevity. Pare every sentence down to the barest meaning, remove unnecessary adjectives, stop repeating yourself, etc. I promise you, your writing will improve. So not only will your essay actually meet the requirements, you'll (probably) get a better grade for it.

On preview, yeah. What everyone else has said.
posted by god hates math at 2:14 PM on October 3, 2006

Modern versions of Word, you can just tell it how many pages you want it to be and it will automagically tweak the settings to make it so.

However, your essay will be *better* if you edit it down. Running long in early drafts is actually exactly what you want to do, and then you want to cut out the crap and leave only gold.
posted by jellicle at 2:16 PM on October 3, 2006

The ones that bend the rules stand out.

Exactly. The person grading these will have looked at maybe dozens before yours. Any attempt to use "subtle" tricks will be instantly detectable--including 1.7 spacing, moving the margins, decreasing the font size, etc. etc.

Edit. Get out a red pen and attack your paper like you hate it. Cut out uneeded words, clauses, sentences. Your paper and your grade will improve.
posted by LarryC at 2:25 PM on October 3, 2006

What everyone else said. To edit, one easy method is to read it aloud. The parts that ramble and beg to be cut will reveal themselves.
posted by Phred182 at 2:26 PM on October 3, 2006

As a screenwriter, I know all the formatting cheats in the world. They are pretty obvious. Line spacing, para width, header and footer sizes, font size, character spacing etc.

However what happens when you cheat length like this is that you get a document which looks dense and reads slow. These are Bad Things.

The two rules of writing, from G K Chesterton I think are "stick to the point, and whenever you can, cut".

Any document can be edited to any length. There is a famous story of a writer who had a 140 page script which he insisted he could not cut to the requisite 120 pages.

The producer said "I can do it".

The writer asked "how?"

The producer took the script, grabbed 20 pages, and ripped them out. Then handed the script back to the writer.
posted by unSane at 2:26 PM on October 3, 2006

First: Edit, Edit, Edit.

Second: Leading (aka line spacing.) A point on 11pt gets you about 5 extra lines of text.

Third: Font choice. Stone Serif can increase a paper by 10-20% almost imperceptibly. On the other hand, Adobe Garamond can be a god-send when trying to fit stuff. If you're really trying to be fancy, a multiple master typeface that has a width axis can also be tweaked a little. (Although I'm not sure what the support for MM typefaces is like these days.)
posted by printdevil at 2:30 PM on October 3, 2006

Don't screw with little fonts and tiny margins and all that unless you believe that your professor or grader really is dumb as a post.

If you're a freshman, it's likely that your profs have been writing papers and setting fonts and margins and all that since before you were born. We know the tricks, and don't usually like it when a student pulls a lame trick to try to get around requirements.

If there's a two-page limit, it's there to keep you focused and force you to be concise. Work within those requirements by being focused and concise.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:33 PM on October 3, 2006

The tricks for changing the apparent length really only work for longer papers. For example, write 19 double-spaced pages, and then bump your spacing to 2.1 or 2.2. Voila! For a two pager, though, it isn't really going to help. I'd just edit.
posted by danb at 2:35 PM on October 3, 2006

Print it on slightly larger paper.
posted by blue_beetle at 2:36 PM on October 3, 2006 [1 favorite]

And again: edit, edit, edit. Teachers and editors are not stupid, and can spot major formatting cheats a mile away. Additionally, speaking from personal experience (I used to be a teacher and am now an editor), depending on the situation I find such cheats either laughable or insulting (probably not the reaction you'd like your intended recipient to have, no?). I am never fooled, nor am I ever charmed.

I mean, if you're going a line over onto the third page, it's not a big deal. But any more than that and you need to cut some of those special snowflakes.
posted by scody at 2:39 PM on October 3, 2006

Leave the settings alone and edit.
posted by muckster at 2:41 PM on October 3, 2006

Use Garamond (or Palatino) 12pt instead of Times New Roman. Both are a bit narrower (or smaller anyway) than Times.
Edit: I have no problems spotting when one of my students has fiddled with the margins, fonts and spacing - except they usually try to make it to make a paper appear longer.
posted by mummimamma at 2:42 PM on October 3, 2006

caveat: Of course you want to edit first, because yes it does make for a better paper.

Having said that:
I got my way through two undergrad degrees (one of which was in English) with this kind of formatting stuff both to increase and decrease apparent length. You can definitely get away with it. Yes, they will probably notice, but you probably aren't the only one doing it and they aren't likely to care. Those that really care about how concise you're being would stipulate a word limit instead of a page limit. YMMV, but I've used 1.5 linespacing, 11pt garamond all the time and never once had a TA or prof even mention anything about it.
posted by juv3nal at 2:43 PM on October 3, 2006

First cut any adverbs. Then cut any adjectives. Then cut as many conjunctions as you can ("ands," "buts," "in additions," etc.). Change "howevers" to "buts," "change "in additions" to ands.

Look carefully to see where you repeat the same idea twice. Look carefully for sentences that don't contribute to the greater whole. Cut, cut, cut.
posted by croutonsupafreak at 2:46 PM on October 3, 2006

Remove all of your adjectives and adverbs (especially the adverbs), seriously. They are probably superfluous anyway.
posted by oddman at 2:47 PM on October 3, 2006

As a person who regularly grades 40 of these at a time, I can tell you that the ones bending the length rules are painfully obvious, and usually don't make good use of the extra words they squeeze in anyway. 11 point font is ok, 1" margins all around is as small as it's ok to go on margins. 1.5 spacing is really obvious and really annoying because it doesn't leave enough room for comments. It's all obvious, though, so if your prof is a hardass you will not get away with it.

Everyone is right that you need to just lose the extra words. Ruthlessly editing your own work is one of the most valuable skills you will develop in school -- don't skip out on learning it.
posted by LobsterMitten at 3:03 PM on October 3, 2006

Two more points.
Your prof might indeed never say anything about it -- but her/his reaction upon first looking at your paper will be "Oh, look at Mr. Smartypants here, with his little font and extra words." This will be followed by reading with a jaded eye. You don't want the prof to begin reading with contempt for your essay, do you?

Also, look for places where you are using bigger words than are needed or otherwise trying to puff up their essay in phony ways. A lot of my students will say "Plato clearly states that blah" when they could say "Plato says that blah". Or they'll begin their essays with grandiose but meaningless "warmup" sentences like "Since the dawn of time, man has yearned to understand the true meaning of questions of existence. In Plato's Republic...", when they should just begin with "In Plato's Republic...". Can you cut out anything like this in your essay?
posted by LobsterMitten at 3:16 PM on October 3, 2006 [1 favorite]

I agree with the "edit" camp. When I was faced with a similiar problem, I got a copy of Elements of Style and skimmed through it (I read it in full later.)

That book has one piece of advice that transformed my writing: "Make every word tell." If you find a word that doesn't help convey what you are writing about, get rid of it.

In addition to shortening your writing, getting rid of passive sentences will do nothing but improve your writing.
posted by SteveTheRed at 3:33 PM on October 3, 2006

Omit needless words.
posted by orthogonality at 3:38 PM on October 3, 2006 [1 favorite]

8 lines, 103 words, 585 characters:

What are the most subtle ways to decrease the apparent length of my Word document?

I am writing an essay that should be no more than two pages in length, double-spaced. What I've written goes well beyond that in Times New Roman 12 point font. What tips do you have for decreasing the amount of page space that my text occupies? I don't want it to look particularly cramped.

I'm willing to:
-Decrease font size to 11 (10 is too small)
-Decrease the margins
-Change fonts (though the new font should be comparable to Times New Roman in terms of professionalism and readability)

---

3 lines, 46 words, 251 characters:

How to subtly make a Word.doc look shorter?

My essay, in 12-point Times New Roman, exceeds the two double-space pages limit. How can I make the text look shorter, but not cramped? I could use a smaller margin or font size, or a different font face.

posted by orthogonality at 3:49 PM on October 3, 2006 [7 favorites]

My dear young man, don't take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.
posted by Andrew Brinton at 3:50 PM on October 3, 2006 [2 favorites]

If you're having trouble editing it, give it to someone else for them to edit. Not a buddy - they'll want to be nice to you. You don't want nice, you want feedback.

Take it to one of the writing workshops that your uni offers - free of charge! - and get their feedback. Take it to your Mom or your old high school social studies / english / whatever teacher (if you're a freshman, anyway). Go see the sessional lecturer during their office hours. Etc.
posted by raedyn at 3:50 PM on October 3, 2006

Er, double-spaced. So 252 characters.
posted by orthogonality at 3:50 PM on October 3, 2006

Must squeeze my essay:
2 page doublespaced word.doc.
Can't look cramped. Advice?

/12 words.
//(and a haiku).
posted by Phred182 at 4:44 PM on October 3, 2006 [2 favorites]

Typographic tricks to fit >2 pg text into <2 pgs?br> (40 characters)
posted by LobsterMitten at 5:08 PM on October 3, 2006 [1 favorite]

You have a moral obligation to mark Ortho's edit of your original post as "best answer!"
posted by LarryC at 5:18 PM on October 3, 2006 [1 favorite]

Expressing ideas and views concisely is a valuable skill. Editing for length is the purest option here.
posted by roomwithaview at 5:33 PM on October 3, 2006

Can I derail just a little to ask why on earth anybody in the 21^st centure is talking about assignments in terms of pages?

Everybody in education has a computer. Everyone has a word-processor. We no longer use typewriters set at a universal 12pt monospaced typeface.It's the purest insanity for people to talk about the length of written works in terms of pages.

I had this myself when I was teaching a while back.

ME: I want a thousand-word assignment on this next week.

STUDENT: Mr Chapel, how many pages is that?

ME: If you print it on A5 paper in 24-point type, Jennifer, I'd think about a hundred pages. Just write a thousand words.

STUDENT: (rolling her eyes) No seriously! How many pages?

Are there really still teachers who set assignments in pages?
posted by AmbroseChapel at 6:10 PM on October 3, 2006 [2 favorites]

Assignments in pages say "I trust you, the student, to be reasonable and give me something in about 12 pt Times with normal margins. We're all adults here. It's convenient for us both to think in terms of pages, and I am giving you the benefit of the doubt that you are past juvenile tricks to increase apparent length."
posted by LobsterMitten at 6:16 PM on October 3, 2006

Delete adverbs. No, seriously. 80% of the adverbs in your paper do not contribute to their sentences in any meaningful way.

I will now misquote Mr. Samuel Clemens: "Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be." The expansion of this quote to other adverbs is left as an exercise to the reader.
posted by Netzapper at 7:55 PM on October 3, 2006 [3 favorites]

You probably don't want to do this, but: sometimes changing the page format to two columns (and maybe landscape orientation) will save you some vertical space. This works particularly in the case of many short paragraphs (I do it with scripts/dialogue sometimes).

Yes, any of the "tricks" to decrease the length of your paper will probably be obvious to your teacher. Actually, my two-column suggestion might also make it harder for him/her to read.
posted by amtho at 8:11 PM on October 3, 2006

Netzapper writes "I will now misquote Mr. Samuel Clemens: 'Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.'"


That's a very insightful point Netzapper and his friend Mr. Clemens make.
posted by orthogonality at 8:48 PM on October 3, 2006

Use heavyweight paper and a duplexing printer, baby!
posted by rob511 at 2:10 AM on October 4, 2006

The most complicated ideas can be stated in the simplest and most spare manner. As a professor, I see lots of long papers that are just so much spewing, and few that need to be as long as they are. There is no prize for length.
posted by fourcheesemac at 7:39 AM on October 4, 2006

You have a moral obligation to mark Ortho's edit of your original post as "best answer!"

Yes!
posted by jbickers at 7:31 PM on October 4, 2006