Quote:
Originally Posted by Infinite_Loser
the TA who said that there was nothing wrong with my paper being short, but just to be sure that I had covered everything. I wasn't going to sit here and just add BS to my paper to meet an arbitrary length requirement.
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Length requirements tend not to be arbitrary, professors know how much text it takes to discuss a topic in the proper level of depth. And even if the professor's length requirement was arbitrary I doubt they'd miscalculate to the point of requiring a 20 page paper where only 7.5 was sufficient.
Good ways to lengthen your paper while also making it easier to read are to add headings and subheadings to the text to denote the different sections. If you are having trouble doing this then chances are your papers ideas are jumbled and poorly organized. Have you also included introductory and conclusory sections of your paper. You may see this as filler, but it really makes a paper easier to read, just going into the analysis can leave the reader stranded. That being said, the best way to lengthen a paper is to state the obvious. While a certain point may be obvious to you because you have labored over the research, to a reader who has spent less time with the specific subject matter of the paper things might not be as clear.
One last point regarding the TA. They might have said they dont really care about page length, but once they have a stack of papers all around 20 pages and you turn in one only 7.5 pages long something is going to be going round their head. They may be appreciative of something shorter to read, but chances are if there are inadequacies in your paper they will be magnified.