I cannot stand when there is a certain number of pages I must type. It drives me nuts. It dilutes the essay, and it's a totally subjective number. Besides, brevity is the soul of wit. Anything you can say in five pages can typically be trimmed down to a chocked full page, which makes the casual reader far more interested. Just a rant of mine as I sit here belaboring my points for a five page paper on Peter Fritzsche's Germans Into Nazis. Anyone else agree with my general sentiment?
Tenacious D and Polonius never got along. But yeah, I hate when you have to add a few paragraphs with weak points and then try to tweak you intro and conclusion to have an extra few lines, which end up being superfluous.
Put your word processor in 10 point times new roman with no margins and single space. Then just write one page, and when you reformat, you've got it. Same amount of writing, but it seems less. just a way of tricking yourself.
. That's exactly what I always do minus the ten point font. Single spacing everything until the very end is a good mental trick on tackling those papers with specific page number requirements.
If you really know the topic, five pages is not enough. College papers aren't supposed to be witty, they are supposed to be informative. I was just like you when I was in undergrad. Now I can write 5 pages to describe my nailcutting habits.
Just make a detailed outline. Then, fill in the sentences for the outline. Boom. if you don't like outlines, make a clustering first. It takes like 2 minutes, and saves you an hour.
I usually go right to the page limit or a little over. I probably need to focus on being more concise in my papers.
