Small, Medium, or Large? Simple End-of-Term Strategies to Help Students Address Word Counts and Page Requirements

At the beginning of the semester, instructors often notice that when they introduce major assignments, students note the due date in their planners and add the appropriate length and format for their documents. Students understand that instructors and graders appreciate well-formatted, correctly scoped documents and value the concrete expectations that such guidelines provide. The differences between a two-page white paper and a 23-page research report are dramatic, after all.

Despite the appeal of length recommendations, students often find themselves challenged at the end of the semester when their writing process yields an output that isn’t a perfect fit. While instructors often include criteria such as “appropriate level of detail” or advice like “avoid extraneous details” to promote particular features of writing, this guidance may not be specific enough to help students produce work that meets the concrete word counts and page limits instructors have established. This blog post outlines simple strategies that instructors can offer to students who find themselves with too much or too little to say.

Strategies for writers whose drafts are too short

Encourage students to review assignment sheets often: Brief in-class reminders, Canvas announcements, and assignment checklists can all serve this purpose. Assignments usually provide cues to writers about the various components of a completed draft and their relative importance to the finished product. Calling attention to grading criteria can also guide students in their self-check practices, especially when instructors explain the weights of different categories.

Encourage students to seek additional information and corroborate what they already have: For genres that demand documentary evidence and research, returning to source materials can provide further details or corroborate existing information. If students' search strategies are not providing sufficient information, examining metadata from their current sources can help them find additional information. 

• Who has cited this author’s work?
• What else have they written on the topic?
• What subject headings in the source’s library record could provide more information?
• What “related resources” does the database recommend?

Help students see where they might add relevant detail: When students perceive their primary audience as a knowledgeable assessor or evaluator, they often elide details they believe are self-evident to experts. Asking the questions “how?” and “why?” after any declarative sentence can help make students' thinking more visible, promote the inclusion of relevant details, and fill out an otherwise anemic draft.

Example: The U.S. Senate ratified the Panama Canal Treaty in 1978.

How? The Treaty, along with a companion Neutrality Treaty, was passed by the Senate after weeks of shrewd negotiation and dealmaking by the Senate Majority Leader, Robert Byrd, and Senate Minority Leader, Howard Baker. (Senate.gov, 2025) 

Why? The Treaty was the first foreign policy initiative of the Carter administration, and was intended to address both the limitations of earlier stopgap renegotiations of the original 1903 agreement (NPS.gov, 2025)

As one might predict, each sentence generated using this strategy can also elicit additional how and why questions, leading to a more detailed and thorough examination.

Strategies for writers whose drafts are too long

Review the assignment components with students and encourage them to edit accordingly. Reviewing the critical assignment components with students can help promote a narrower focus. Instructors can note what sorts of detail might be extraneous, or even edit a baggy example paragraph in class to model effective editing. For example:

Baggy: Ever since the dawn of market economies, economists have argued over whether or not the presence of regulatory structures can have positive consequences for market economies or merely negative ones. This is true of the issue of price controls.

Better: Economists have argued over whether regulatory structures have positive consequences or merely negative ones, and price controls are no exception.

Best: Economists disagree over the market effects of price controls.

After confirming the assignment's purpose and essential elements, ask students to review their paragraphs and sentences and then rank them by their importance to the overall purpose. Sentences and even clauses that are peripheral to the overall purpose are the easiest to eliminate.

Help students recognize redundancy and encourage holistic revision: When students compose larger documents (especially over longer durations), it can be easy to generate redundancies. If students are combining smaller initial assignments into a cohesive final document, many of the introductory comments and background details that are necessary for a section to stand alone may be unnecessary in a larger document. Previous writing that helped a student explore ideas or demonstrate their research or writing process can often be condensed to communicate their final conclusions more succinctly.

Model the practice of removing filler words and false starts: 

• In most cases, sentences that begin with pronouns and verbs of being (This is..., There were..., It was...) can be rewritten to include a stronger subject and active verb.
• Intensifiers (very, totally, absolutely) and qualifiers (just, sort of, rather, in my opinion, I believe) should also be used sparingly.
• Nominalizations are another favorite target, where noun phrases take over the work of perfectly good verbs.
  The implementation of price controls has the effect of distorting market values.
  becomes
  Implementing price controls distorts market values.

A Final Cautionary Reminder

Novice writers might still attempt to manipulate fonts, margins, and spacing: Remind your students that few instructors appreciate fiddling with line spacing, margins, and typefaces to make documents longer or shorter, and that choices of nonstandard spacing can negatively dispose a reader to the content of a document.

Novice writers might be tempted to use AI tools poorly: Although many online tools will promise to build adequate paraphrases by replacing words with synonyms, the results of such word replacement tools are often imprecise and occasionally, unintentionally hilarious.

Improved safety technologies reduced accidental deaths by 50%.
vs.
Elevator deaths plummeted as technological switches escalated, cutting dead users quickly in half.

Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) continues to enjoy success among a faction of politically motivated contemporary readers.
vs.
Gibbon’s Decline is still celebrated today by some fans.

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