For students
It says 1,847 and it needs 2,000.
The argument is finished. You said what you came to say. And now there are a hundred and fifty-three words standing between you and submitting it, and every one you add makes it slightly worse.
How to add words without padding
Padding is obvious to anyone who marks essays for a living. “It is important to note that”, “in today's society”, and every sentence that restates the previous one in longer words — a marker reads forty of these a week and spots them in the first paragraph.
What actually adds length and marks at the same time:
Take the obvious counter-argument seriously
Two hundred words acknowledging the strongest objection and answering it is the single most reliable way to move a grade up. It is also the thing most essays skip.
Add the example you left out
You almost certainly cut one for space. Put it back — a claim with an instance attached is better than a claim, and it costs a hundred words.
Say what follows from it
Most essays stop at the conclusion. A paragraph on what the conclusion implies, or where it stops applying, reads as thinking rather than filling.
The opposite problem — 2,400 words that need to be 2,000 — is a different skill, and it is in cutting word count without gutting the argument.
Is any of this cheating?
Worth answering properly rather than leaving you to guess, because it is the question everybody has and most tools in this category pretend not to hear.
Fine, almost everywhere
- ✓Checking your spelling and grammar. This is what a spellchecker has always been.
- ✓Counting words, estimating reading time, formatting a citation.
- ✓Summarising a reading you have been set, so you can get through it faster.
- ✓Rewriting your own sentence when it came out badly. You wrote the thought; the words are a craft problem.
Not fine, and we are not going to help
- ✕Generating an essay you then submit as your own. We do not have a tool that does this, deliberately.
- ✕Running a paraphraser over somebody else’s paragraph to make it undetectable. That is plagiarism with extra steps, and the extra steps are the part that makes it worse.
- ✕Using the plagiarism checker to find out whether copied work would be caught. It is for checking your own writing before you submit, not for testing somebody else’s.
And the rule that covers everything in between: if the ideas and the argument are yours, tools that improve how you expressed them are ordinary. If the ideas are not yours, no tool makes that all right — and your institution's own policy outranks anything on this page, so read it.
“Is my paraphrase close enough to count?”
This one keeps people awake and almost nobody explains it. The test is not how many words you changed. It is whether the structure of the thought is still theirs.
Swapping every third word for a synonym while keeping the sentence order, the clause order and the sequence of points is a close paraphrase, and it needs a citation regardless of how different it looks. Reading the passage, closing it, and writing what you understood from it in your own structure is a paraphrase — and it still needs a citation, because the idea came from somewhere.
The short version: cite it either way. Nobody has ever lost marks for a citation they did not strictly need — and the citation generator makes the cost of adding one about fifteen seconds.
What you can use, free
Word counter
Live count as you type, with reading time. Free, no account, no limit.
Citation generator
APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard, formatted correctly the first time.
Reading time
How long a piece takes to read, based on actual research rather than a guess.
Essay counter
Built around the counts assignments are actually set in.
Word scrambler guide
For the linguistics module, and for the puzzle you are doing instead of the essay.
Cutting word count
The structural cuts, and the ones that damage the argument.
Grammar checking, summarising and plagiarism checking are on Pro — which exists mostly because those cost money to run, not because the free tools are a trap.
One practical thing
Run the plagiarism check before the deadline, not the night of. Every student does it at 2am and discovers an unattributed quotation with four hours left — and four hours is enough to fix a citation and not enough to fix a paragraph. Two days out, it is a five-minute correction.
And if you are working out how long the thing should be in the first place, words to pages explains why “five pages” and “1,250 words” stopped meaning the same thing.