How to flesh out a text that's too short? It's the "killer question" that at one time or another has nagged more than one writer struggling for inspiration...
Yet, contrary to some who claim that "writing is dead" in favor of the spoken word, the reality of the internet today is quite different: the written word is very much king, with pages and pages of content being written and translated every day.
And this trend will clearly continue due to the rise of content marketing, which consists of providing prospects with the knowledge they seek, notably in the form of long blog posts.
But let's not be naive: in a highly competitive web environment, a text must please more than just readers (so it must be long enough).
It must also satisfy Google's indexing bots, which will judge the crawlability, quality, and length of the text content on your site.
In the world of web writing, there are certain conventions regarding text length that should be followed, particularly for SEO purposes.
For example, a product sheet should contain on average 200 words, while a blog post should be between 500 and 600 words. But sometimes lack of inspiration or the simplicity of the subject makes it difficult to reach the required word count.
The situation then becomes tricky, because you find yourself torn between the imperative of the required word count and the real creative block that overwhelms you. Writing is not a trivial automated task: on the contrary, it requires a certain level of involvement and constant creativity.
So what can you do when ideas aren't coming, your text is too short, and you need to expand it? The key is knowing how to add words while keeping the text high-quality and easy to read.
Best practices
Before giving you some tips for lengthening a text, keep in mind that you must follow certain best practices.
For example, when expanding your text, make sure to maintain coherence. This means you need to pay attention to the information already present and take it into account.
You need to perform this "graft" with delicacy: it must be completely invisible to the reader. The overall approach and logical structure of the text should be preserved and even strengthened by the additions you plan to make.
Expand a text doesn't mean making it heavierA bad practice is to add too many linking words. If all your paragraphs begin with "Furthermore", "Next", and if you insert "so", "also", etc. at every turn, your text will become very difficult to read.
Indeed, linking words are essential, but you must use them wisely at all costs. If they seem artificial, they will obscure the reasoning rather than highlight its connections. You must therefore resist the temptation to overuse them… otherwise you risk undermining the text's ideas and losing your reader.
The writing style, the form and the type of text must not be forgotten either. Your goal is to keep the text original and interesting, while conforming to standards.
This is the difficult balance inherent to any writing: you need to add a touch of originality, both to please the reader and to avoid duplicated content severely penalized by Google, while staying within the rules of a well-defined exercise, depending on whether it's a social post, a newslettera blog article… Each medium indeed has its own writing codes and its own implicit rules about how to address the reader.
For example, on a product page you should avoid including statistics or quotations, as those are more appropriate for a blog post.
The product page should be scannable at a glance, and should therefore focus on the product's technical aspects (dimensions, use, features).
By contrast, a blog article is considered a reference and should therefore systematically rely on primary research (recently updated figures, findings from an authoritative research center).
Finally, to properly expand a text you need to go deeper, not stay on the surface. How? Here are a few tips.
6 ways to expand your text
1. Use circumlocution
One way to increase your text's word count is to replace certain terms with periphrases.
Be careful, don't replace just any word. Choose an important term because the periphrase will allow you to beuse keywords and/or adjectives useful for your SEO.
Such a practice should be used in moderation out of concern for readability and coherence. It will gain you a few words, but if you're far from the target you should use other techniques.
The question, then, is which type of text is or is not suited to the use of periphrases. Keep in mind that some terminologies do not lend themselves to periphrasis at all. For example, the domain legal, but also the domain medical will tolerate no reformulation of their keywords – at the risk of creating ambiguity or, worse, a misinterpretation that could have disastrous effects on texts that are important to the reader.
By contrast, the use of periphrasis is entirely appropriate in texts where the literary dimension is strong. Thus, in a travel piece, you might replace “Marseille” with “the Phocaean City” or “New York” with “the city that never sleeps,” especially if the place name is repeated many times throughout the text.
Not only will you thicken your text, but you will also enrich its suggestive potential, making the reader dream through carefully distilled connotations across your periphrases.
So keep in mind that periphrasis is ideal in texts where you seek an emotional effect in the reader, but should be avoided in purely technical texts.
2. Add or develop examples
If your blog post is too short, you can expand it by adding examples. This helps illustrate your points and makes them easier to understand.
You can also expand existing examples by providing more details.
The main thing is to provide useful information to your reader.
For that, background research is essential. You should also cross-check your sources: multiplying information sources is the best way both to gather a lot of information (and thus easily expand an overly short text) and to verify its accuracy.
3. Add additional sections
Here is another way to add more words to your text: adding a new section.
Let's take the example of a product page. If you were content to describe the product, its features and its usefulness, you can add a paragraph about the brand.
In a blog post, you can add a “Tips” or “To go further” section; this will add extra value for your readers.
It can also be the little “extra” that makes the difference in the mind of a prospect who has already compared several sites selling the same product.
All else being equal, a prospect will tend to choose the distributor or provider who seems friendliest and most attentive to their customer concerns, despite the inherent impersonality of online sales. Again, whatever you add, the information must be useful and relevant to your topic.
4. Add resources
There are several ways to add resources to your text.
In a product page, this takes the form of links to other products. In addition to enriching your text, you will boost sales by suggesting similar products or essential accessories.
In a blog post, you can direct your readers to other articles so they can get more information on a topic.
There is also a positive side effect to this practice: you thereby improve the internal linking of your site.
You can also add numerical data such as statistics to lend credibility to your points.
Because the human brain works in such a way that it can be carried away by persuasive words, its rational side is, however, convinced by numbers, which the mind generally sees as reliable and indisputable. Adding figures is therefore a valuable way to expand a too-short text while giving more weight to its argument.
5. Adopt a different angle
This technique can notably be used in an article intended to give advice.
These are generally very popular articles because they provide short-term reassurance when the reader hesitates to start a project or make an investment.
After listing some best practices, you can include a section on mistakes to avoid.
However, be careful to always maintain a benevolent tone: if the reader senses, rightly or wrongly, a tone of superiority in your words, they will emotionally close off to protect their ego. You will have lengthened your text, but you will have lost a potential customer.
6. Hire a professional writer
One last way to flesh out a text that is too short is to entrust it to a professional writer.
With a fresh perspective, it is sometimes easier to add new relevant ideas while keeping the reading smooth.
You can call on the services of a qualified writer on Redacteur.com.
Have you ever found yourself facing a text that was too short? How did you expand it?
