Jan 30
Add Fluff to your Paper with Punctuation
I recently read an article from HowToGeek about finding and replacing formatting within Microsoft Word documents. This is useful for laying out your document, but also reminded me of a tip my roommate passed me about stretching your research paper to make the length cutoff.
Of course, everyone knows the obvious tricks– extra line spacing, character spacing, bigger fonts, wider margin… But it’s these obvious tricks that your English teacher knows too, and she’s not going to buy it. However, my roommate suggested using this selective formatting technique to search for all your periods, and replace them with a size-14 period. Simple as that. Each period doesn’t add much, but you can image how many periods you might have in your average paper. Similar, bump up the size on your commas, hyphens, and apostrophes. Of course, this hint also applies to OpenOffice.
