How to Stop Going Over the Word Limit

Ep. 155

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Going over the word limit in essays, assignments and reports is a common issue I see in knowledgeable, hardworking students.

The biggest problem is the amount of extra work it means they are doing when this happens: Extra writing in the first place, and extra time trying to cut it down before submission.

In this episode I explain the reasons for why this keeps happening for some students (no matter how much they try not to) so we can solve for the root causes.

AND I provide four actionable ways to prevent it in future, so your teen only spends the time and effort that's necessary for any extended task.

FEATURED ON THE SHOW: 

• Related episode: Ep. 131 - Plan EVERY Extended Response
• Related episode: Ep. 151 - Why Students Resist Planning
• Resources page: https://www.rocksolidstudy.com/155
• Updated and upgraded: The NEW! 10 Week Grade Transformation Program
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Transcript

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You're listening to the Parents of Hardworking Teens podcast, episode 155: The problem of going over the word limit in assignments and essays, and why I think this is such a large issue because it is costing students so much time and effort unnecessarily. I'll share four specific strategies that I use with students to help prevent this in the first place—which is absolutely the preferable way—and how to deal with it and cut back strategically and effectively if it has already happened and we just need to cull.

Hey VIPs, how are you going? I hope you and your teens are doing really great.

I have maybe a slightly croaky voice this morning! I had a 50th birthday party to go to last night, and it was a lot of fun. There was a lot of dancing, there was a lot of singing, which is the main reason why my voice is not on top form today. There was some amazing food and some good drinks. I'm not a huge drinker, but I am partial to a lychee martini, and there was one or two of those! So it was a great night, and I am still here recording this podcast for you because I had a couple of things I still need to get done today work-wise.

One of the things that passed over my screen in amongst this was this issue of word limits and going over the word count. Immediately, my brain started throwing out all of these things that I often share with students and work with students on, and I just decided I would get on and record a podcast about it. So here we are.

I know that this is a very common issue for particularly hardworking students—students that have a lot of knowledge, a lot of subject content that they have worked hard to learn, and students who really want to do their very best and show off their capabilities and their ability in their subject. They want to really demonstrate all of this information that they have learned. Completely understandable; I absolutely fell into that category as well as a student.

The problem with this is—and I know that if you have a teen where this happens, you will be well aware of this problem, and I'm sure it is very frustrating—you'd really love some ways to help this basically not happen, and be as proactive about it as possible, which is always my preference. So I am going to talk about some proactive strategies that I always use with students, but I will also give you some solutions if we are already past that point.

I had a student recently share with me, to review and critique and improve, a paragraph that was supposed to be a maximum of 400 words. It was a body paragraph for an essay, and when I looked at it, I was like, "This is way more than 400 words." I just scanned over it in Word, and it gives you the little word count at the bottom: it was just over 1,000 words. So over double the word count.

I know that sometimes this has already happened; it's too late to be proactive. So I am also going to share some strategies on how we go about cutting, culling, and editing it back so that we do not lose anything that is going to lose marks. We want to keep the marks, we want to keep the quality, but obviously cut some of that content. I will tell you, the first piece of good news is often getting rid of something is actually a way to up-level the quality. It can up-level the sophistication, it can up-level the flow, and it can up-level the cohesion. So that is the good news!

We need some good news here because I really see this problem of going over the word count as a significant problem. I am not going to sugarcoat any of this or gloss over this. I really want to take a few moments to highlight the problem with this, and that is essentially that I see this as giving your teen—or your teen creating for themselves, really—triple the amount of work. Like I said, couple this with the fact that this is often the students that are already doing a ton of work, doing their very best, putting in so much time and effort, that this just compounds the issue even further. They are doing triple the amount of work.

Let me explain to you why it is triple:

First, they are doing the correct, appropriate amount of words. Let's take that 400-word body paragraph as an example. Your teen has written their 400 words.

Second, they've ended up getting up to—let's not even say a thousand words—let's say they get up to 600 words or 800 words, which is not uncommon at all; I see it a fair bit. They have now done that same amount extra. So now they've essentially doubled the amount of work. They've got the amount of work they should have done, and they've done the same amount again. Sometimes it's even more, sometimes it's less, so let's go in the middle. They've done the same amount again, so now we've doubled the amount of work.

Third, now what do they need to do? They need to spend so much time cutting, culling, and editing to get it back down to that word limit. Often, that can take the exact same amount of time again. It takes them as long to cut and cull as it did to write the thing in the first place. Understandably, because it's quite a process. There's a lot of thinking that needs to go into it, a lot of re-reading, and a lot of re-writing. Sometimes we can't just get rid of a sentence and then those other two sentences either side just flow together; that's not how it works, right?

So they've got triple the amount of work. Like I said, this is often with students who are already putting in a ton of work. So this really is a big issue, and it's really unnecessary. It's completely avoidable.

This is why I'm very passionate right now—I don't like using that word a lot, but it's probably the word that fits the best right now—very enthusiastic right now about helping students to avoid this proactively. We want to avoid this proactively. We just don't want them going over that word count in the first place so they're not doing the extra work on the extra words, and then they're not doing the extra work on cutting and culling it back.

I cannot emphasize this enough: the most important stage to this—and I will say the most important stage to writing any assignment, essay, or extended response—is planning that response in detail.

I know that students do not want to spend a lot of time on the planning because they think they want to spend the time on the writing. But I spend a lot of my time coaching students on their planning. I have specific trainings and resources inside of the Study Vault that is available to my coaching students, my 10WGT students, so that they can make a very efficient and effective plan without it taking longer than it needs to, because it is so important. It is the thing that they want to skip over and not spend the time on.

I've said it before, and I will say it again: any time that is put into a detailed, structured, intentional, well-thought-through plan will save them double that time in their writing. So if they spend 10 minutes on a plan, it will save them 20 minutes in their writing. I'm thinking about an exam situation there. If they have just an essay or assignment they're working on in their own time, they might spend 30 minutes, they might even spend an hour on writing it. But when you think about how many hours they put into then actually writing the full response, I guarantee that if they were going to be spending, let's say, 10 hours on it—which I know some students do, I know it sounds crazy, but I know some students are spending that—that will absolutely gain them back two hours off of that time. If they spend 30 minutes on it, it will save them an hour's worth of time in their actual writing of it, their editing of it, and their final submission. I promise that is true because a plan makes everything else so much smoother, so much easier, less arduous to actually go ahead and do and complete. But also, the double-whammy of it: it will create a higher quality response because everything has been very intentionally structured, planned, thought through, and positioned.

I have a couple of podcast episodes just about planning. So if this is something you know that your teen could use some help with and is something they still avoid, in fact, I'll go to that one first. One of the podcasts is "Why Students Resist Planning," it's episode 151. So, www.rocksolidstudy.com/151. I will put a direct link to this in the show notes, and I will also put a direct link to episode 131, which is called "Plan Every Extended Response." I also have a much more detailed, process-based training on this in the Study Vault, again, available to all of my 10WGT students and my coaching group students. So go check that out if this is something that, after listening to this, you're like, "Okay, I really need my teen to be better with planning."

But I'll get a little bit into this here now today on this episode with regards to word limits. Part of that planning is I always have students allocate a word count to each part of their document.

If it's an essay, they've got an intro, they've got three or four body paragraphs, and they have a conclusion. Let's say it's a 2,000-word essay. We'll be like, "Right, we've got 150 words maybe for the intro, we've got 300 to 400 words for those body paragraphs depending on how many they've got, and we've maybe got another 100 or so words for the conclusion." Give or take, and obviously, they can be flexible. It might be that you end up having 450 words on one of the body paragraphs because it's a really meaty part of the topic. You may then take it away slightly from one of the other body paragraphs, or take it away a little bit from the intro or the conclusion.

I always say to students: you are not getting a lot of marks for your intro and conclusion. There are some features that definitely need to be there—it's not like they're not needed at all. In fact, if you do not have an intro or a conclusion and it is supposed to be an essay, you will get marked down for essentially not having a complete essay structure. But you can have—and this is more for an exam situation, I'm just detouring a little bit here—they could have a one-sentence intro if they're running out of time. It's one of the reasons that I say write the intro last. They could have a one-sentence intro, they could have a one-sentence conclusion, and they now have a complete essay. Time-wise, that will serve them so much better than having a lengthy conclusion and having to cut back on their body paragraphs. Anyway, that was a little detour, let's come back.

So they're going to allocate a word count to each part of that essay. Likewise, if it's some form of report or assignment, they want to allocate their word count to each part, each section of that report before they start writing.

Now, this is the same if they have some form of presentation, speech, or oral delivery. Sometimes it will say something like it needs to be a five-minute speech. Now, what students can do is figure out: what is their words-per-minute speaking rate? Generally, if you go online, it will say somewhere between the average speaking rate is like 120 to 150 words per minute. I always kind of say I'm probably at the 150-plus when I'm talking! But if you're delivering a speech, obviously, you want to slow that down. It needs to be impactful, it needs to be clear. So I err on the lower end of that, so maybe we'd be looking at around 120, 130 words per minute. And now, you have a word count because you're normally structuring, scaffolding, planning, maybe even writing a full script. Maybe they're doing like a podcast-type task, and you need to have a word count for each of the sections of your script or of the plan of your speech.

Again, I see so many students writing out their whole piece, their whole script, their whole content, and then they go to deliver it, they record themselves, and suddenly they realize that they're at like 8 minutes 40, and they're like, "Oh no, now I've got to get it down to five minutes, how do I do that?" You do it before you start writing anything.

Now, there are a couple of benefits to this:

Benefit number one: You know very early if you are going over the word count. If you've written your body paragraph—and I'm not saying intro here because, like I said, you write the intro last; it's much easier to introduce something when you already know what it is you're introducing. It's very hard to write an intro; if your teen ever gets stuck with writing the intro, that's probably because they haven't written the body yet! Get them to write all the body and then go back and do the intro—but you know very quickly if you have got a body paragraph, let's say like this student, and they suddenly realize—even if they realize, I'm like, "Do your word count checks as you go." If they realize, "Oh my gosh, I'm nowhere near the end of what I want to say for this body paragraph, and I'm already up to 500 words," just stop. Stop there. Don't wait to get to the thousand, and certainly don't wait to get to like the 3,000 or 4,000 that you've got for your 2,000-word essay. You get early intervention, and you get proactive intervention. This is a much more proactive way to do things.If you realize, "Okay, I'm already going over or I'm over within the first paragraph," you stop and you take stock there and then. This is very often what my students will do. They'll come to me and they'll bring something to a coaching call, and they will say, "Hey look, I'm only this far, but I'm already way over the word count. Can we just talk about where this is already going wrong, how do I need to pull it back before I carry on working on the rest of it?" And that's absolutely what I want them to do. We figure out where and why are they going over, what are they doing too much of, and how are we going to cut that back without losing marks.

So I'm going to talk to you now about some of the ways that we can do that, so that your teen can use these themselves if, hopefully, they're doing that early intervention, or worst-case scenario, they are already way over and they need to start cutting and culling. Rather than them just generally trying to figure that out, I want them to have some very specific techniques and strategies to do exactly that.

The first thing I encourage students to do is really think about, okay, go back to what is the focus of the question or of the task or of the essay title, and make sure that they are clear on that rather than the topic.

I actually have a two-step topic and focus system that we use to dissect essay questions. We figure out what is the topic, we spotlight the "topic trap"—the whole idea of "writing about." There's never a situation where we need to write about a topic; there's always something they are actually asking your teen to do. That is the focus of the question.

Let's just say the question is: "To what extent was Hitler a great leader?" Obviously a little bit of a controversial title there on purpose, but for students who are studying how does a leader become powerful and gain power and then lead their party and lead their country into something like this, these are the sorts of questions that they may well be getting.

The topic would be Hitler as a leader. I'm going to get a lot of responses, I can guarantee, that talk about Hitler—how he came to power, what his life was like, what his childhood was like, what his strengths were, what his weaknesses were. And yet, that is the topic trap they have fallen into. They're going to be including a lot of information that is, what I would say, relevant, but it's not specifically tailored and honed to the question.

The focus of the question is to what extent was he a great leader. So we need to get the focus on: what were the leadership qualities, and in what way did they serve him in becoming a great leader, and in what ways maybe were they weaknesses, and in what ways did they not serve him in being an effective leader of a nation?

Again, when we say effective, we don't mean good; we know that there were not good outcomes there. We are talking about effective leadership. That's one of the reasons why I know it comes up as a topic and an interesting question that students have to answer within the subject of modern history.

So first up: have they got the focus of the question, or are they just writing about the topic of the question? Get rid of anything that's just topic-related and not focus-related.

Next, what is the purpose of this task? What am I supposed to be proving or demonstrating? Again, I have a whole training on this inside the member portal, and it's literally called "What am I supposed to prove to the marker?" Essentially, what is the purpose of this task?

Is it to show that I have lots of information about Hitler and who he was, and have that related to Germany at the time? Partly. You're going to need a little bit of contextual information, you're going to need some background information for sure. But what am I really supposed to be proving or demonstrating? I'm supposed to be proving or demonstrating the skills of evaluation. What were the most significant characteristics or actions that he took? What were the ways that it strengthened his leadership, what were the ways that it weakened his leadership? And if we're talking about modern history, it's going to be skills in analyzing sources. What sources have I selected to help demonstrate those strengths, those weaknesses? It's proving those skills, not just proving and regurgitating and including a whole lot of information.

Knowing and being clear on what am I actually supposed to be proving or demonstrating through this task is really, really important. Those would be my absolute top recommendations because those are also the things that are going to move your teen up those marking criteria and have them achieving more of the marks in relation to what the question demands and the marking scheme requires.

But let's just say they are still over the word count. They're still over the word limit. These are the next things that I would be looking for, and I have a little name for these: the 3 R's (repetition, redundancy, and relevance vs. significance). Honestly, it should probably be an RRS! You'll see why it is in a second.

1. Repetition

Am I kind of saying the same thing twice? I see this happen a lot, especially in the middle part of a body paragraph where they're explaining, they should be analyzing, they should be giving the impact, and are they really saying the same thing but in a slightly different way? They've just kind of reordered the point within the sentence. But if I got rid of one of those sentences, would I still have a paragraph that flows? Would I still have the information that I need within that paragraph? If the answer is yes, get rid of one of those sentences, or if there's good parts of both, merge them together and take out the parts that aren't needed. So, repetition.

2. Redundancy

The next one is redundancy. Now, this is a little bit more nuanced; this is a slightly higher-order skill to be able to master. That is: by the time I have gotten to the end of my analysis, does something that I'm mentioning later on in the paragraph mean that something I mentioned earlier is kind of redundant? Like, I'm making that point more clearly, more comprehensively a little bit later in the paragraph, or sometimes even in the next sentence.

I will say a lot of this comes into structuring the detail and using strategies like my "Three Steps of Analysis" to help avoid this, but that really is too much for me to try and get into here on a podcast. However, is there something in an earlier part of a paragraph that then, once we've gotten to the end of the paragraph, means that that is already covered, it's already been made clear later on, and we could therefore remove it earlier on? It doesn't happen as much, but it's definitely a high-level skill just to be aware of and look out for.

3. Relevance vs. Significance

Then finally, this is where everything in this paragraph could absolutely belong there. There is nothing that is repeated, there's nothing that's redundant, there's nothing that's off-track with regards to the focus of the question. This is like our final reserve step in this editing and culling process: Is it relevant, but perhaps not the most significant point? This is where they may have multiple supporting points, multiple pieces of evidence, or multiple examples of something, and they could all be correct. But this is where we need to be, that beautiful word that they like in descriptors in those marking guides, discerning. Have we been discerning in selecting the most relevant, the most significant, the most important points to back up or support the paragraph?

There may be something that is perfectly good, it could absolutely go here, but I've got to get rid of something, so this is how you decide which part to get rid of. You need to keep the most impactful or significant or important points, and be disciplined, be discerning enough to get rid of and remove the things that just aren't as significant, aren't as important. This probably is the most depressing or annoying or frustrating part of this process. So I know it will feel not nice to be able to get rid of them, but it's exactly what needs to happen.

So the good news, I hope here, is that there are plenty of ways to be able to reduce that word count and do it very intentionally, strategically, and do it in a way that is a little bit faster than just trying to randomly figure it out and randomly edit and randomly cut down. When I say random, I don't mean it's just all over the place, but what I really want your teen to have is to have a systematic way to do this. It's like: first I'm going to look for repetition, then I'm going to look for redundancy, then I'm going to look for relevance versus significance. Have some steps to go through it; it will make the whole process so much more efficient, but it's also, like I said at the start, going to result in a higher quality piece.

As always, if you would love for your teen to have my support, my training in doing all of this for themselves so they become skilled and independent, and have my eyes on their work, guiding them, advising them, training them, teaching them on these things, then drop me an email to support@rocksolidstudy.com and just include the word "info." You have two options for this: you have the self-study 10-Week Grade Transformation program, or there is my group coaching. If you're interested in either of those, send me an email: support@rocksolidstudy.com.

I hope that this has been helpful. I hope it gives you plenty of steps, strategies, and tips to help your teen ideally proactively prevent themselves from going over the word limit, or being able to cull and cut strategically if they are. Have a wonderful rest of your week. I will see you back here for the next episode soon. Take care. Bye!