17.6: Cutting "Fluff" while Meeting Length Requirements

If you have ever written a formal essay, you’ve probably experienced something along the lines of the following scenario: you have reached the end of your paper, and have said all you can say about your topic—but you are still 300 words below the minimum length requirement! In many cases, students facing this deficit resort to one of two strategies: they either pile on vague “fluff” sentences that wind about, approaching but never reaching a clear point to take up space, or they decide that the idea of a required length is arbitrary and therefore fine to disregard.

While length requirements may seem tedious, they allow instructors to provide students with a specific idea of how deeply to engage with a particular assignment. A 2-3 page paper on a broad topic like climate change, for instance, will require far less detail than a 7-8 page paper on the same topic. Paying close attention to length requirements as you write will give you an idea of the scope of the assignment and, by extension, the quantity and quality of time and effort you should expend on completing the assignment.

So, what can a student do in a situation like this? Before you decide that you have covered your topic as extensively as possible, consider taking the following steps to determine where you might add depth (as opposed to length alone) to your essay:

1. Re-read your essay. Have you fully connected each of your claims and supporting points? Have you provided the necessary context for a relatively uninformed audience to understand your argument without engaging as fully with your experiences or source materials as you have? Are there holes in your story/argument, or people, places, and ideas that you have not fully fleshed out? If so, this is an area where you can fill out your essay a bit while adding important, specific details.
2. Revisit any sections where you incorporate outside sources. Have you briefly summarized the source material? Have you introduced and cited your sources? Have you fully explained how each source works to support your own claims/ideas? If not, this is a prime place for expansion!
3. Ask a peer or tutor to read over your essay and identify any areas where you could “unpack” your ideas a bit more fully or clearly. In many cases, getting a fresh perspective on your writing can help you to add nuance and clarity to your writing.
4. Review the assignment guidelines for the essay you are writing. Have you included all the information your instructor asked for? Have you followed formatting guidelines properly? If not, congratulations! You have found yet another area for meaningful expansion.
5. Last but not least, consider sentence variety. As we learned in the first portion of this chapter, you can make your sentences as straightforward or as complicated as you deem appropriate. If you read through your essay and notice, for instance, that you write primarily in simple sentences, revising to incorporate a wider variety of sentence structures can be a small but powerful way to add a bit of length and depth to your paper.

See this list of “fluff” phrases for more help cutting fluff from papers.