The Overrunning Essay: Cutting 900 Words to 650 Without Losing the Argument
A candidate has written a 900-word essay for a 650-word limit (tolerance ±5%). The topic: whether social media has weakened face-to-face communication. The draft has a strong thesis in paragraph 1, four body paragraphs, and a conclusion that repeats the introduction. Paragraph 2 gives two statistics and a personal anecdote; paragraph 3 restates the thesis in different words; paragraph 4 contains the counter-argument and its rebuttal; paragraph 5 is a second anecdote about a family gathering. The candidate has 25 minutes left and cannot rewrite from scratch. Markers penalise both over-length and loss of coherence, and the essay currently scores well on content but poorly on structure.
1. Identify which material to cut, in what order, and justify each cut against the marking criteria rather than against word count alone.
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Cut in this order. First, paragraph 3: it restates the thesis, so removing it loses no content and immediately repairs the redundancy that markers penalise under structure. Second, paragraph 5: the family anecdote is illustrative but not evidential; paragraph 2 already supplies an anecdote plus statistics, so a second one is repetition of method, not of point. Third, compress the conclusion to two sentences that state the position and its qualification rather than re-listing the body. Do not cut paragraph 4: the counter-argument and rebuttal are the strongest evidence of higher-order reasoning, and deleting them would trade a length penalty for a content penalty. Do not cut the statistics in paragraph 2. After these three moves the essay is roughly 650-680 words, within tolerance, and the remaining structure is thesis → evidence → counter-argument → rebuttal → conclusion, which is exactly what the structure criterion rewards.
2. The candidate also worries the essay now looks 'too short' in argument. Explain how to spend the freed time to strengthen rather than merely shorten.
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Shortening is not the goal; compression plus one upgrade is. With roughly 25 minutes left, the candidate should spend about 10 minutes on the three cuts, 10 minutes adding one sentence of explicit evaluation to paragraph 4 (for example, naming the condition under which the counter-argument would succeed), and 5 minutes proofreading. The added sentence costs about 20 words but raises the paragraph from description to judgement, which is where the top band is separated from the middle band. The lesson is that the word limit is a budget, and the correct response to an over-budget draft is to reallocate spending toward the highest-value moves - rebuttal and evaluation - not to shave words evenly from every paragraph, which flattens the argument and preserves the weakest material.