Writing an Essay or Article that Has a Word Count Requirement?

A six-step planning method for concise and anxiety-free success

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

The dreaded length requirement for an essay or article.

It can be nightmare fuel for writers that are used to operating within their own flow and structure. It can be intimidating for students who see the number of pages they have to write — they turn pale and get squeamish faced with what feels like an impossible task. It’s an immediate headache if you’re a contractor who has a client with a word count requirement. Or, perhaps you know that you have to fill a certain amount of space for a personal project, and it feels like the walls are closing in on your freedom.

All of those situations have tension built-in.

So — I’m going to give you a quick method for knocking out any length-required project before your anxiety has a chance to grow from that seed of doubt in your mind.

The method — the Elbow House and the Elbow Room

Break your writing down into six stages.

1. Create an Elbow House target. First, write down your word count requirement. (For easy math, we’re going to say you have to write 800 words. Add 25% more words to that number. That leads us to 1000 words. 1000 words is now your Elbow House target.)
2. Create an Elbow Room target by Dividing the House Up. Break down your piece into an even number of sections (‘rooms’) that make sense for your assignment. We’ll say we are going to have five rooms — an introduction, three supporting sections, and a conclusion. Divide your Elbow House Number (1000) by the number of rooms that you have (5). Now, 200 is your Elbow Room target.
3. Write out placeholder section names for each of your Elbow Rooms. So right now in front of you on a single page, you should have the title of your article and five subsection headlines — (e.g. the title of the piece at the top, then ‘Introduction,’ ‘Reason One of My Article,’ ‘Reason Two of My Article,’ ‘Examples that Support my Arguments,’ and ‘Conclusion’).
   - The more detailed you make these placeholders, the more focused your writing will be underneath them, so spend some time on this step. If you’re writing a story about the importance of public squares in Brazil, your middle three subsection titles might be ‘The History of Public Squares in Brazil’, ‘Social Integration and Urban Planning in South America’, and ‘The Value of Green Spaces in Modern Brazilian Culture.’
4. Start writing under the ‘Introduction’ headline. Have the word count function of your word processor on and visible — write until you hit your first Elbow Room target (e.g. 200 words). Write naturally what comes to mind as you introduce your topic. Don’t edit anything. When you hit your target, finish your sentence, and then drop your cursor under the next headline subsection.
   -(Write under the next headline until you hit 400 words, finish your sentence, move your cursor under the following subsection, etc. After you finish your conclusion, you’ll have just more than 1000 words.)
5. Next, you’re going to read your piece backward. One sentence at a time, jump your eyeballs up and read everything from bottom to top. When you run into long sentences or weird phrases, cut things out. When you run into information that doesn’t support your conclusion, cut things out. If the syntax is awkward, cut things out. You’ll find that you slowly get rid of unnecessary words, phrases that don’t support your writing, fluff, and adverbs (wah-waaaa).
6. Now that you’re back at the top, fully edit your piece on the way back down. This is when you fix any grammar mistakes. This is when you tighten down your language in a chronological sequence. This is your chance to add transitions between sections. If you can, do this inside a grammar checker (Grammarly is awesome, Google Docs works well) so that you have consistent automatic feedback on your word choice and sentence structure as you work your way through.

You’ll find that by the time you finish step six, you’ll have a tightly written, concisely worded, syntactically correct, and grammatically appropriate article or essay that fulfills your word count requirement.

Writing a piece this way will get rid of a lot of the handwringing that you might feel if you’re aiming for your original word count requirement without a more structured plan.

The Elbow House method gives you a lot of Elbow Room (get it!) to write more freely and naturally the first time through (steps 1–4), and then the steps afterward create a built-in re-structure that you can consistently rely on no matter what your topic is (steps 5–6).

If you know your project has sections that are longer or shorter than others, you can adjust where your Elbow Room targets are, but the same general guidelines apply. Write more than you need to per section, cut the fat and fuzz on the way up, and fix the final details and add transitions on the way back down.

The next time you have something that to do that has a required word count, try this method out. You’ll immediately feel how much potential it has for easing your creative paralysis with length requirements!