How to Make an Essay Longer

There are plenty of people all over the internet whose tips to make a paper longer include making the punctuation size 50, changing your margins to 1.03”, using orange and green striped paper, or something equally absurd, but while writing an essay for my writing seminar, I came across some just as ridiculous actual ways to make an essay longer.

First off, quote poetry.  A lot of it.  MLA formatting will tell you to give each line of poetry its own line in your essay if you’re quoting more than three lines of the poem.  Depending on whose poetry you’re reading, some of these lines will only be two or three words long, but they’ll each get a line in your paper.  With a dozen or so words, you could be up to a quarter of a page closer to the end of your essay.  This also works for long quotes, but regular quotes become single spaced while poetry remains double spaced.  Half the words, double the space.

Second, only cite articles whose authors have really long last names (bonus points if they’re hyphenated).  If no author is listed, find articles with almost exactly the same titles so that you have no excuses to try and shorten the titles in your parenthetical citations like you’re supposed to.

Once you've completed step two, proceed to alternately cite your sources.  Instead of putting one citation after a whole paragraph, put information from a different source in every sentence.  Since all your sources should have citations that take up at least half a line, this should double the size of each paragraph.

Alternatively, you could just write your paper.  Every word you type makes your essay longer.

And in case you were wondering, what is considered the longest last name belonged to a man who can be looked up as Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff.