Why may you need to use an automatic online word count shortener?
The need to preserve a specific word count is called the essay's "scope" – an extent of analysis a student should not exceed in a particular assignment. In these cases, a paraphrasing generator that can remove redundant words and help you keep within the assigned word count.
🔢 What Is Essay Word Count & Why Does It Matter?
As you will quickly notice at school, college, or university, every assignment contains specific instructions that cover the word count your home task should include.
Why are they important?
This is done primarily to minimize your effort and help you plan the working schedule. For instance, you will understand that you need to reserve 2 days for a 3,000-word essay and can manage a 500-word essay in 2 or 3 hours.
Besides, the word count sets the scope for your research; you will surely need to check fewer literary sources for a 500-word essay and visit a library a couple of times to write a large-scale 5,000-word study.
In other words, the word count of your essay task sets the limits for your study effort and gives you hints about the depth of research you need to conduct to meet the professor's requirements.
✍️ Word Count for Various Essays
A practical guide may also help you determine the time and scope of various academic assignments. Here is a comparative table with word counts for assignments at different study levels.
✂️ Tips to Reduce Word Count in an Essay
If you're not ready to use a word count reducer and want to do everything manually, here are a couple of workable techniques for word count optimization.
- Avoid redundant beginnings. It's good practice to start a sentence with a subject. This way, you will avoid extensive "running starts," such as "as a matter of fact," "summing the presented evidence," etc. Your sentences will be simpler to read and free from redundant phrasing.
- Use active voice. Passive-voice phrases always add a couple of redundant words to a sentence. If you don't really need to disguise the doer of the action, you should use active voice only. You'll see how neat and clean your text will sound.
- Remove adjectives and adverbs. Adjectives and adverbs are frequently used in literary language, as they add vivid details and shades of meaning to notional words. However, they often create clutter in academic writing and are fully avoidable in most cases. So, you should consider removing most of them to make the text more readable and shorter.
- Don't exceed 25 words in a sentence. Academic writers are often tempted to sound more scholarly with long, overloaded sentences, including many compounds. In reality, such writing efforts rarely pay off, as they confuse the readers and disguise the core message the writer wanted to deliver. Thus, it's better to divide long sentences into several parts. Using this trick, you can avoid redundant transitions and simplify the content flow.
- One idea at a time. A logical progression of an academic text is a vital criterion of readability. Thus, you should explain relationships between variables or focus on one supporting argument at a time, avoiding a discussion of several factors in one go. This technique will improve your text's comprehension score and free readers from overly complex argumentation, causing a cognitive overload.
In all other cases – a lack of time, no desire to go through the entire text again – welcome to our word reduction tool that will make your editing job a breeze. Try our title maker and paraphraser to write and polish your essay quickly.
❓ Word Count Reducer FAQ
❓ How to count words in an essay?
It's pretty easy to control your word count in an essay. You should activate this function in your Word file, and a small tab at the bottom of your page will update you about the document's current word count as you type the essay's content. You can also click on "Statistics" in the Word menu to learn additional statistics about your text, such as the number of characters with and without spaces and the number of lines, sentences, and paragraphs you currently have.
❓ What is the word count for a college essay?
Word count is a specific number of words (or a range of words) that your professor assigns for writing. For instance, your university tutor may require students to write from 1,000 to 1,500 words in one essay. Thus, you can't compose fewer than 1,000 words (the paper should be at least 1,001 words), and you shouldn't write more than 1,500 words. A standard threshold for exceeding the assigned word count is 10% (so it's okay to submit a 1,650-word essay).
❓ How to reduce word count in an essay?
There are many techniques for word count reduction, such as cutting the articles, conjunctions, transition phrases, and running starts from the text. You may also consider changing passive-voice phrases to active voice or replacing some complex, sophisticated phrases with simpler words.
❓ What does a summarizer do?
A free text compressor available on our website can reduce the word count of your essay by removing redundant words that don't hold any vital meaning and can be removed without losing the text's quality. You can reduce the word count and combine several sentences into one automatically to achieve high-quality text reduction.