Free Essay Shortener for Students

Have you written an essay that is way past the number of words recommended by the professor? Need help summarizing it without losing the context of your content? Try our free essay shortener tool!

🛠️ How Does This Essay Shortener Work?

Summarize your research paper or article using these easy steps:

• Open the document or website you would like to summarize.
• Highlight and copy the entire text you would like to process (it shouldn't exceed 15,000 characters).
• Paste the copied text into the blank field of our essay shortener.
• Specify the desired number of sentences in your final text.
• Click the "Shorten" button and enjoy the results.

🤔 Do I Need to Shorten My Essay?

Typically, an essay is shorter than a research paper, or thesis and may vary in length depending on several parameters, such as the level and subject of study, course requirements, and departmental guidelines.

Usually, your assigned essay will have clear guidelines on the required number of words or pages. The most common range is 10 to 12 pages or 2,500 to 3,000 words.

If you have exceeded your assignment's requirements, our free essay shortener is here to rescue you.

Essay Word Count Guidelines

Type of essay	Average word count	Essay content
High school essay	300 – 1,000 words	These are often 5–paragraph essays with an introduction, a main body of approximately three paragraphs, and a conclusion.
College admission essay	200 – 650 words	They are usually short personal essays expressing your interest in the institution and your motivations to study there, and the word limit is very strict.
Undergraduate school admission essay	1,500 – 5,000 words	The length, content, and context often vary depending on the institution, syllabus, course level, and department.
Graduate school admission essay	500 – 1,000 words	These essays often require long personal statements and/or statements of purpose accompanied by your academic achievements and motivation for joining the institution.
Graduate school essay	2,500 – 6,000 words	Graduate school essays vary from school to school but are often long research papers or essays.

✂️ 7 Ways How to Shorten an Essay Effectively

You have worked hard on your assignment and spent countless hours researching, formatting the paper properly, and building your argument. Now that you are ready to submit your essay, you realize that you have exceeded your word count by a huge margin and are struggling to shorten it without losing your essay's credibility or key debating points.

Otherwise, the article may be too short, and you're running out of time to bring it to the expected word count. Our "shorten essay" tool is here to sort that headache out for you. If you want to perform the task by yourself, we’ve prepared a guideline for you.

Check for Redundancies in Your Essay

Scan your essay for any repeated points or phrases and delete them. For example, if your essay focuses on the ways to solve the issue of global warming and mentions planting trees for oxygen purification twice, you should remove one point. If you emphasize the same point in several different phrases, choose the one expressed more clearly and delete the other.

Delete Unnecessary Information

Check for any details that do not support the argument and eliminate them. For example, if you are writing about the achievements of Martin Luther King, then you don't need to write his childhood history in detail. Redundant and irrelevant details can load your essay with too many extra words.

Eliminate Unnecessary Articles

There are some elements of spoken grammar that translate poorly into written language. They make your article appear wordy and cumbersome. Using articles of speech such as "the" or "that" multiple times in a sentence becomes unnecessarily lengthy and makes your work hard to comprehend.

For instance:

"It is recorded in history books that Dr. King was active in the 1950s and the 1960s."

can be shortened to:

"Dr. King was active in the 1950s and 1960s."

Get to the Point

Be as precise as possible as you are building your argument. Getting to the point brings clarity to your argument by avoiding unnecessary deviations and reducing the wordiness of your essay.

Use an Active Voice in Your Essay

Articles that use an active voice tend to use fewer words than those with a passive voice approach. Writing your essay in an active voice also communicates your argument more effectively.

Look at the difference:

Active voice: John Snow conquered the Empire in 1510 AD.
Passive voice: The Empire was brought down by John Snow in the year 1510 AD.

Remove Unnecessary Prepositions

Prepositional phrases make your essay wordier and may even reduce the quality of your argument.

Look at the difference between these two phrases:

"For most people, the reality of moving into a new city is a cause for a host of anxieties."
"Moving to a new city makes most people anxious."

Avoid Redundant Adjectives and Adverbs

Adjectives and adverbs sound convincing in spoken debates but may water down your arguments in written format.

Let's look at the difference between a sentence with adverbs and adjectives and one without.

"Bill Clinton's entire presidency was absolutely scandalous and majorly controversial."
"Bill Clinton's presidency was controversial."

Undoubtedly, the second sentence makes a stronger argument since it goes directly to the point. Our online generator tool can help you create such statements.

Thank you for reading this article!

Now you have learned the standard word count for various assignments and understand how to reduce word count on your paper. Still, you probably need more time to edit your paper down to the required word count. Use our online essay shortener tool to polish your paper in a few minutes.

Check the other writing tools we’ve prepared: paragraph changer and heading generator.

❓ Essay Shortener FAQ

Updated: Apr 26th, 2023

🔗 References

1. Word Count | IOE Writing Centre - University College London
2. How to reduce word count without reducing content
3. Summarizing - Academic Integrity at MIT
4. Guidelines for Writing a Summary - Hunter College - CUNY
5. How to Shorten Your College Essay Without Ruining It! - Patch