I need to get about 20,000 more words out of it. I know I won’t get much help because you havn’t read it but are there good general rules for what to do once you’ve completed the basic paper to get more words down.
What’s your dissertation about?
When I need to expand on something, I often use examples. For example, I recently gave a speech to a writers’ group about writing children’s stories, and I used many examples from stories I’d had published to show how I figured out plot points, etc.
See what I did there? I used an example. 
In a dissertation, I suppose the examples would be more data.
Who is putting a gun to your head and making you add more words to your dissertation than the entire length of mine? Seriously, shorter dissertations are better in just about every way. If you really needed that 20 kilowords of stuff in there, you’d have it there already. A grad school colleague of mine made his dissertation photocopies of the journal articles he’d already published. If his dissertation was 20 pages it wasn’t 21. He got his doctorate.
If your advisor or committee is making you do this, ask them why. You are a peer to them now for all practical purposes. Your opinion is worthy.
-Typo Knig, PhD (Physics - My dissertation was 80 pages including end notes)
Have you done a literature review?
(hard humanities diss here, was 85,000 and change with notes but without bibliog)
I don’t know if this would be of much use - turn contractions into full words ie wont = will not, don’t do not.
This might help too What words count towards the word limit? - Free College Essay Help
Do you mean ‘down on paper’ or ‘word count needs to come down’?
Good question. I read it as needing another 20,000 words yet.
If you are trying to increase your word count, do an annotated bibliography.
This is my question- my PhD dissertation was just about 100 pages, since it was based on a lot of biochemistry which meant years of data condensed down to a few charts of data. But I had my story to tell, and I could tell it concisely, so absolute word count was never an issue.
Is that different in your discipline or specific program?
My dissertation needs to be 40,000 words (the university I transfered from needs only 10,000 words for the EdD) and my adviser is sticking to that. Adding to the Lit Review now but I question about what is the maximum percentage of the paper that can be the LR.
Can you expand on your research methods sections a bit?
How about adding to future work? What is about again (besides being about 20,000 words at present.)
Is your research complete or do you need to do more to make the dissertation more substantial? I don’t mean that snarky at all! I would worry that if you have 20K words more that you’re trying to fill in on a 40K word thesis, will your committee feel it is in depth enough?
Einstein’s paper on the photoelectric effect is 24,946 characters long with spaces when translated into English. Published in 1905, it won him the Nobel Prize for 1922. The theory of general relativity (again, translated into English) is 195,552 characters long with spaces.
I don’t know what your dissertation topic is, but perhaps extensive quoting of material in the public domain, properly attributed would be in order. A minimum number of words or pages is the mark of someone who doesn’t have the slightest clue when to shut the fuck up and vastly overestimates the importance of what is being said and the level of interest in the audience.
Is this a thing?
A good paper is as long as it is.
Well, yes, it is. Major milestone University papers generally need to be of a specific length. For instance, my thesis needs to be a minimum of 60 pages, maximum 70 pages (no work count min/max).
Put all of your research and notes into the dissertation. Every survey, every response (properly anonymized), all the plans, all the summaries - every single character. They want shovelware? Give them shovelware.
A key skill you learn getting an advanced degree is how to set a goal and meet it. You want your EdD. Your university only wants to count words. Give them what they want, and you’ll be Dr. Saint Cad. A lot of life is about jumping through arbitrary hoops. Too much of life IMNAAHO, but sometimes you can’t fight city hall.
I agree with **Typo Knig **- show your work. You’ve got data, you’ve got thoughts about data, you’ve got the processes you used to get the data, you’ve got the data that didn’t end up helping you in the end - shove it all in there.
If all they want is a pagecount, then give it to them.
I would take your actual dissertation where it is now (where you’re happy with it) and save it somewhere as your “best work” example. Then just take a copy and bloat that baby out to make them happy.
Basic bloating techniques just for writing:
Adverbs and adjectives are your friends.
Examples of anything that can be exampled.
Tables, graphs, and other “visuals.” (Make sure to re-produce the contents of them all in words as exhaustively as possible before actually explaining them)
Block quotes are wonderful.
If you really just need to bloat existing content without adding new stuff in, I’d go with classic paragraph structure from grade school:
Main sentence. Rephrase main sentence. Example 1. Explain relevance of Ex1. Example 2. Explain relevance of Ex2. Example 3. Explain relevance of Ex3. Re-phrase main sentence again. Expand main sentence to link into next paragraph. Summarize this paragraph.
You may also want to stock up your alcohol* cabinet before beginning this process.
*insert relaxant of your choice if preferred.
How many pages is 20k words in the required format? My school required such ridiculous margins that a 2-page publication (with pictures) turned into seven pages (with 32 additional pages of supporting information.) Just trying to get a feel for how much padding we’re talking about.
I don’t think we had any guidelines other than “overly long is discouraged.”
That’s about double what you have. Probably the best thing to do would be to do more research. Going through the pain and frustration of padding just to pad especially to this degree I think is a waste of time. Now, if you’re research is expensive and you’re running low on time, then yeah, examples, literature reviews, verbed charts, executive summaries, asides, and copious footnotes relating to side topics are the way to go.
Yeah. It’s a quick and dirty way of showing that there’s enough “meat” on the project to qualify for the degree. If the standard is 250 pages, then although no one will particularly care if you write 247* pages, an 18-page paper, even if it’s brilliant, isn’t going to cut it.
Now dissertations in the sciences tend to be shorter than those of the humanities largely since the actual procuring and analysis of data takes so long and it can usually be condensed down in several ways. That’s just how data works. With the humanities, this really isn’t possible, making the text longer for the same amount of time and thought. More or less. Also, the “future” is a factor in the length and structure of dissertations. If you need to have published a book to get tenure, you will have a longer integrated dissertation, whereas if you need to publish only some number of articles, a shorter dissertation that contains more disparate work on some central theme works better.
Anyway, just to toot my own horn, my Ph.D. is in French, and not including front and back matter it is 76,369 words. Which is short by about 20% for my field, but I adamantly refused to do a literature review.
Also, someone asked how many words fit on a page. Given that my dissertation ended up being 257 pages, I had 297 words a page. That’s with 1.5 inch margins all around. I had no charts or diagrams or footnotes.
*Playing those undergrad page-length games does wonders once the text is so long. Changing the margins 0.05 inches will give you dozens of extra pages.