By how much do you increase their size?

Just a font or two actually makes a huge difference.


Plus it's not as easily recogniseable as the obvious and common trick of increasing the margins.

I wouldn't go more than 2 above the rest of the paper. That starts to get noticeable.

lol.... wow.
wow.
lmao
thanks though. i'm off to college

I'm doing it on a college paper now.

Why write 10 pages of good prose when I can only write about 8 and get away with it?

Well known trick.

But yeah. Find and replace all 12-point-font periods with 14-point-font periods. As long as you're submitting a hard copy and not digitally, it works much better than margin-bullshiting and other easily detectable crap.

Lucky you, living in a system where the number of pages you write is crucial... it seems like we Brits are amongst the few, rather than many, who have taken the obvious step to counteract this by having to write essays that have a certain number of words (generally +/- 10%).

1500 words is the standard uni essay length

Interesting, I'd never thought of just increasing punctuation. I guess a quick ctrl+f,ctrl+} would get that sorted very quickly. When writing the thing that annoys me most is when something just creeps over the page, and suddenly your sections don't fit neatly. This means I much prefer to vary my font throughout, using 11.5,12&12.5 to make sure each page is neatly filled, and that the new pages start new sections!

Wow, I didn't realize page length was still an issue, in high school everything was based on word count and in college it was "did you address the issue"

@Captain Dave - It depends on the professor, when I was in college here in the US, I had some that assigned a certain number of pages, but just as many if not more required a certain number of words. I did spend a semester at St. Andrews, but can't remember whether my papers were required to be a certain number of words or pages (it's entirely possible that that depended on the class as well).

Hmm thanks DrOct, and at any rate the Scottish education system is different from the English. But I have never ever heard of anybody in the UK who was required to write an essay that was a certain number of pages long.

I'm UK (Bristol/England) and haven't heard of it either Cpt Dave, although I do know certain teachers who are more generous if its in a sensible font. Make it too big they get horrified, make it too small and they seem to get annoyed!

I've never seen that either, and I'm in Exeter UK.

Exeter? That's where I studied! I graduated last year... kinda wish I was still there as well!

@DrOct: I did my degree at St Andrews from 1999-2003. It was always word count, not number of pages, that counted. Just counting the number of pages is a _stupid_ way to judge whether a piece of coursework is long enough.

@Invictus: If you've done well enough to reach the academic level where you have to submit "large" research papers (I'm assuming 10,000 words or more), then you should have the honesty and integrity to try to produce a decent piece of work, rather than buggering about with the punctuation to try and make your inadequate work seem somehow more impressive.

Excuse me for sounding like a grumpy old curmudgeon, but I'm not impressed by this thead.

Wow there, Jamiet99uk! MY work is far from inadequate. I've gotten an A on every paper I've written in college. Granted, I'm a freshman, but if there's one thing I can do it's write.

Grading a paper is a very subjective job, and why shouldn't I help my chances by making it look a little longer?

Yea, there are other tricks to doing this as well. If you add a space to move your section onto the next page once in awhile, it can't hurt. Also, if the paper needs to be double-spaced, which it often needs to be for comments, make it 2.05 spaced.

The best thing to do imo is increase the size of the lines (in Word it's under Paragraph --> Line Spacing). I generally go with 1.2 size lines and size 11 font. Not only will it increase the number of pages, it also makes it easier to read and make notes on when printed out.

If we have a length to write (normally a maximum not a minimum anyway!) it's always a wordcount. Doesn't it seem likely that the professors who set page lengths expect this sort of cheating though and therefore just increase the required number of pages? I doubt professors grade on quantity anyway: it's quality that matters, so by employing these tricks you're probably lowering your mark...

Hmm, Hamilton beat me to the line spacing suggestion. Another one is character spacing (same place in Word). I've never used it before, but I'm sure a tiny increase wouldn't be noticeable.

Captain Dave...awesome. What did you study? I'm feeling awful today, did a Topsham Ten last night.

Why not choose to add weight to your papersbg using weightier arguments?

I thought it was down to about Topsham Seven? I had heard that a load of the pubs stopped allowing students in! Sadly I never got round to doing the Ten myself - I got a little buggered by having a year abroad (I studied German, to answer your question) and not really ever living with my close friends. Plus it always sounded like far too much alcohol for me to trust myself to catch a train at the end of it all :S

Neat trick. Typically if I need more pages... I write more. =D

This is because my problem isn't usually that I've run out of things to say, but usually I've run out of space to say them because I tend to be very verbose. My struggle comes in when I have to cut things down, make things more concise, and give it all a logical structure. I take pride in my writing, and I'm a little sad that being in the Faculty of Science offers very few serious writing assignments.

@Jamiet99uk - They probably did require word count, but I honestly don't remember, because in general it was pretty irrelevant to me whether it was pages or words, usually a certain number of words is about equivalent to a certain number of pages, so I just did what I was assigned, and if it was shorter than it needed to be I tried to figure out how to make it longer, but more often it was longer than it was supposed to be so I had the (I think) much harder job of cutting it down.

If you graduated in 2003, you were probably there during my semester abroad there! I would have been a junior (3rd year) student there for the spring semester there. What was your specialty there? I took a couple of International Relations classes, Terrorism and Ethics of International Relations, both good classes, the second was particularly excellent.

I'm a current college student and all the papers I've had were graded on the argument/content over word count/length.

@prsman27 I doubt any professors I had actually graded based on length, but they did require a certain length, and then graded within those parameters.

They may not consciously base on length, but it's much more impressive when a piece is pages long and I would expect that affects their judgement.

Thanks Invictus, this is going to be very useful!

Pathetic. Just pathetic.

@DrOct: My degree is International Relations! Small world. We probably did run into each other at some point!

To avoid boring these people unduly, feel free to email me if you want - my email address is shown in my profile.

I have to agree Glorious.

And there are always those profs that are just assholes and grade based on the stupidest pretexts. They would never ADMIT to grading based on length, and it isn't the most important thing, but try turning in a one pager and see where you get with it.

Jamiet, in my opinion, a concise work is superior to a lengthy one. If it can be explained more simply, explain it more simply. If you have to cut out content, then you should stop cutting. So I will use this trick when I feel I have said all I should but I have not met the arbitrary page length requirement.

Whatever, Jamiet99uk. Half the fun of learning and being in school are the little tricks that keep you ahead.

Don't put on some sort of a holier-than-thou attitude, here. There's a lot of competition for grades these days and anything you do to improve your position that's not explicitly cheating is just fine.

This trick isn't a substitute for writing well, but it doesn't hurt. Lighten up, buddy.