If there is only one thing that binds together all of humanity, it’s that we all love to write papers, and the longer, the better. The other day while I was eating lunch, I noticed that campus is just BUZZING with excitement as the days become shorter, the weather gets cooler, and our assignment piles get higher. I smiled as I bit into my sandwich, overhearing one girl bragging about how she gets to write a 12 page research paper by next week. Her friend was so jealous, and so was I.

The only problem with writing papers is that they are never allowed to be long enough. Professors fill our heads with so much information and beg us to do further research on our own time and then they go and limit our page length! It’s almost as if they don’t want us to succeed at getting all the information out.

But don’t stress out about this for any longer, because there are several ways in which you can make your paper appear shorter than it is. While none of these tricks alone can shrink your paper length, when all used simultaneously, I feel confident guaranteeing you an extra body paragraph or two.

First and foremost, eliminate all extra spaces. Do not put two spaces after every period. If this were a perfect world, I’d suggest not putting any spaces at all. However, times have unfortunately changed since the days of Ancient Rome, and punctuation is a thing of the present. Also, make sure you have the functions “remove space after paragraph” and “don’t add space between paragraphs of the same style” turned on. They can both be found in the line spacing section of your Microsoft Word toolbox at the top of the page.

A super secret is that you can also change the line spacing. Double space wastes so much room! In “line spacing options” you can type in your own personal line space. I’d stick to 1.8 or 1.9 spaced though, so your teachers don’t start asking questions.

Now that all your unnecessary blank spaces are filled, take a look at your annotations. Do you have two quotes from the same source? It would be silly to cite it twice, especially if they follow one another. Remove the first citation and cite it all together. This trick usually always earns me a few lines!

Last, but not least, go over your paper and check your diction. Did you use the most concise wording you could have? Switch the wording around when you use phrases like “very” and take out words like “a lot” and “though” whenever you can.

Writing a paper is so much fun, and you shouldn’t have to get stressed out when your word count or page limit gets broken. With the help of these tricks, your papers should meet the guidelines in no time.