Padding the Paper

You said "four-page essay"? Hmmm...

A student (from elementary school all the way up to college) has been given an assignment, or someone has to write a news report, or any other situation in which someone needs to write a document. Only trouble is, they don't spend a lot of time writing it. Maybe they can't—they might have been busy (whether with procrastination or genuinely important things), forgot until it was too late to do any research or the teacher just set a ridiculously high minimum length for something the student can't write that much about. Maybe they don't want to, because they're lazy or hate studying.

Alternatively, they do try their best to say what needs to be said, but the assignment or whatever requires more words/paper to be used.

What's their solution? Padding the Paper, of course! This is any tactic used to make a short document longer. It could involve writing or typing in a very large font, drawing pictures (sometimes to exploit the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words"), or adding extra words, like adjectives, adverbs, and "very"s (if they repeat "very" many times, it overlaps with Department of Redundancy Department). Sometimes, they will even add the words "The End" to the end of their paper to up the word count to 100 (or whatever the target count is).

Usually, whoever receives the paper will be none too pleased, and if it's a teacher, they'll tend to give the student a C, D or even an F or an F--. Usually Played for Laughs. See also Loophole Abuse and Exact Words which this can cover, and In-Universe Factoid Failure for another way to fail at an essay. The paper in question might be a Last-Minute Project. Can overlap with Laborious Laziness if it takes so much time to pad it out that they could've actually studied, and it might be a Completely Off-Topic Report, and believe it or not, this is, in fact, Truth in Television, especially in college. Sometimes it works out surprisingly well. Other times...not so much.

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Examples

Comedy

• The Dutch comedian Andre Van Duin had a sketch where he played a primary school kid who had to write a paper about "the cat" of at least 50 words. The majority of the text is "heeere kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty ..."

Comic Books

• Transmetropolitan: Spider Jerusalem's column on The Beast's election comprised one word repeated 8,000 times. When he takes his job back in the first issue his new editor specifies the next column have 8,000 printable words.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: One story arc has Calvin doing an assignment about bats. When Hobbes points out all he has is one "fact" that he made up (claiming that bats are bugs), Calvin replies that once they add a few illustrations and a conclusion it will look like a graduate thesis. It... does not go well.
• Doonesbury has Zonker Harris at Walden College furiously tapping away at a typewriter, explaining to Mark that he has a lot of papers due. Zonker bangs off two paragraphs of abstract musings, whereupon Mark asks which course this paper is for. The response? "Dunno, haven't decided yet."
• In one strip of FoxTrot, Peter's three-page book report on The Great Gatsby consists entirely of "The Great Gatsby is about a guy named Gatsby" written in enormous font.
• The Outrageous World of Alex and Charlie: In one strip, the gang is working on 1000-word book reports. Dazelle, who is doing hers on Jacob Two-Two, complains that she only has 532 words and already said it was "very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very good." Alex suggests that since Jacob Two-Two said everything twice, she could write the report twice. Dazelle appears to consider it. At the end of the strip, Alex reveals that she's drawn a picture for her report, since "a picture is worth a thousand words."
• In Peanuts, Sally often does this in writing reports for school.

Jokes

• A schoolboy is told to write a 1,000-word essay on pets. He writes, "I have a pet dog named Spot. Yesterday I took him to the park and let him off his leash. He ran away and I stood for hours shouting "Spot! Here boy! Here boy! Here boy! Here boy! Here boy! Here boy! Here boy! Here..."
• A joke in speech and debate is some variant of: "If you want to be a good speaker, you need to be able to convey as much information as possible in as few words a possible. It's easy, just think of what you do when writing a paper for English class, then do the exact opposite."

Literature

• Animorphs:
  • In The Reaction, Rachel mentions stretching four pages' worth of content for a school paper into five pages by messing with fonts and margins and hoping the teacher doesn't notice anything's off.
  • Marco writes a three-page paper "on the topic of how to write a thousand words and say nothing. Zero. Nada. Squat.". Then Jake suggests "the use of rhetoric to obscure a lack of content". It gets him a B.
• In the book Dave Barry in Cyberspace, Dave describes how to write an essay when you know nothing about the topic and only have encyclopedia/dictionary/historical software available: give the dictionary definition of any word that's even slightly obscure, copy out brief biographical and historical pieces on everyone and every date mentioned, and detour into other tangentially related topics that also have passages in the software that you can copy.
• Dave Barry reflects in his column "The Gulf Between Father and Son Is Called 'Quantum Physics'" that, as an English major in college in the '60s, he had to solve problems like this:
  "You are required to turn in a 15-page paper on The Brothers Karamazov. You have written a grand total of 311 words on this topic. How big do you have to make the margins to make these words stretch over 15 pages? Do you think the professor will notice that your 'paper' is a little anorexic worm of type running between margins wide enough to land an airplane on? Do you think that anybody in history has ever actually read all the way to the end of The Brothers Karamazov? Why?"
• In Harry Potter, the trio talk about writing an essay, and Ron suggests they write in huge letters so they can fulfill the length (measured in feet of a scroll) requirement. Hermione is not amused.
• In one of the Horrible Harry books, Ida ends an essay with a page and a half's worth of "very"s to describe how fun the subject matter was. The teacher gently explains to her that one "very" is enough.

Live-Action TV

• A.N.T. Farm: In one episode, Cameron has to make a 1000-words essay about his father's job, so his father drives him with his police car. Cameron finds the job boring until his father catches a criminal, to which he exclaims "Wow, my dad is a hero!" Cameron thinks this sentence doesn't contain enough words for an essay, but his father says that a picture covers 1,000 words, so Cameron takes a picture of his father with the criminal for the essay.
• For The Muppet Alphabet Album (and future compilations) Big Bird is going to sing a song about words that start with the letter V. He confesses up front that he doesn't know very many such words (he's still a small child, no matter how large physically he is), so he'll be sticking in a lot of "very"s as necessary.
• In Roseanne, Dan helps Darlene write a history report on Betsy Ross. When they finish she brags about doing five full pages, and Dan quips, "Should be, you wrote big enough."
• In Two and a Half Men, Jake has to read a report to the class. When he gets to the by-line, he lists his name, teacher's name, room number, the school's name and address, and so on, until the teacher tells him he isn't being graded by length. After she tells him that, Jake flips the paper over to the next page.
• In Weird Science, Gary works to beef up his transcript in order to get into Paxton University, but he struggles with writing an essay about why he wants to attend (only able to come up with "College is neat"). Lisa tries to help by bringing out his inner poet, but this only results in "College is neat-o." Based on a scene transition, Gary is able to pad out his initial statement into a reasonable essay by lampshading how long he spent trying to write something and spinning that as an overwhelming desire to attend. At the end of the episode, we learn he was accepted, so this (along with the other work he did) clearly worked.

Theatre

• In You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown and his friends are assigned to do a 100 word book report on The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Two of them follow this trope in some way:
  • Lucy pads the assignment by adding unnecessary information (such as that the rabbit was named Peter) and by listing all the vegetables in Mr. McGregor's garden. When she reaches the end and still has about five words to go, she just plugs the space with a number of "very"s between "the end."
  • Schroeder has difficulty finding anything to say about Peter Rabbit until he says the book reminded him of Robin Hood. At which point he goes on a very lengthy and enthusiastic tangent about Robin Hood, occasionally making a token effort to connect it back to Peter Rabbit. ("Away they ran... just like rabbits...")

Web Animation

• Strong Bad Email: In "English paper", Kyle from Kansas asks for some help writing a school paper. Strong Bad obliges by writing some rambling paragraphs about "hustle and bustle", then applying "a little triple-space action" to make them take up the whole page. He also gets another page by adding random pictures of a guy eating batteries.

Webcomics

• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: When Greg has to write an essay on chimpanzees, he doesn't know much about them, so he types in a large font, draws pictures, and at the end, he writes, "Well, it looks like I'm almost out of paper, so I guess this is—-" and then a giant "THE END". This scene is re-used in The Last Straw.
• In one arc of Help Desk, a character is trying to write a short story for National Novel Writers Month, but ends up getting distracted by a new video game for a week. To get back on schedule once he returns to writing, he adds a time loop to the story, which allows him to repeat one chapter several times. When he finishes the story, he does a word count and finds he's six words short of the 40k word target goal, so he adds "And they lived happily ever after" to the end, despite having written a horror story with a downer ending.

Web Original

• CollegeHumor has some tips exactly for this, and suggests cranking the fonts, margins, spacing, etc, as well as using a picture.
• The Daily WTF: In "Very, Very Well Documented", the flight simulator project must fulfill a requirement of "Eight meters of documentation" (implied to be the cumulative height of stacks of standard-sized printer paper).
• Inverted in Unnatural Selection, where Penn laments that she's struggling to make everything she has to say about her project fit the required 50-page limit, so she's contemplating cutting some parts. Likol tells her to submit the paper unabridged anyway, because in the long run, having her name on an incomplete paper would be worse than being failed on a technicality by one examiner (and that's assuming they're enough of a jerk to do that in the first place).
  Penn: I'm already at the minimum font size, too, and I've had English majors look over to try and reduce my word count. (...) What if he fails me?
  Likol: You can retake the class, but you can't unpublish a sub-par paper with your name on it.

Web Video

• In the Brows Held High review for Rembrandt's J'Accuse, he describes some of the film's more inane theories as just filler akin to a student padding out their essay.
  Kyle: (typing) And in the story of Jane Eyre, we can see parallels to Batman. Because, like Mr. Rochester, he is rich, and sad, and his house burns down.
• Jarvis Johnson parodies the confusing prose in animated story videos with a Cutaway Gag about a student trying too hard to pad out sentences in an assignment. "The dog is brown" becomes "The dog, and when I tell you what color it was I was both happy and sad at the same time, and you will be too once you hear my story... it is brown."

Western Animation

• American Dad!:
  • In the pilot episode, Hayley asks Roger to write one of her college essays on poli-sci so she can go out with her boyfriend. Roger admits that he has only a passing knowledge of the subject, but claims that he can stretch it out to six pages if she gets him some snacks.
  • In "Black History Month", Steve tells Principal Lewis that he needs more time to work on his paper on George Washington Carver (having stumbled upon the beginnings of a mystery). The incredulous Lewis tells Steve to simply take the fact that Carver invented peanut butter and pad it out to three pages.
• Arthur:
  • In "Francine's Pilfered Paper", Buster has to write an essay. To make it take up more paper, he writes with huge letters.
  • In "Buster's Growing Grudge", Buster forgets to study, so he writes a "report" that is about eggnog (he was meant to write about King Tut, but "eggnog" and "Egypt" were next to each other in the encyclopedia) and adds on a joke because he believes he will get a higher grade if he makes the teacher laugh. He tells Binky, who tells the joke, so Buster doesn't get to tell the joke and ends up getting a D, which he blames Binky for.
• In the episode "Escape to Beer Mountain: A Rope of Sand" of Clone High, it's the principal who intends to "use a big font [and] futz with the margins." In Scudworth's defense, he has to write a report to demonstrate he understands teenagers to be left in charge of the clone project. Failure means death.
• The Simpsons:
  • In the episode "Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner," Homer becomes a food critic for The Springfield Times and has to write a proof-of-concept review that has to meet a minimum of 500 words. Hilarity Ensues as Homer struggles to write the review even with a little help from Lisa.
    Editor: Well, you keep using words like "pasghetti" and "momatoes". You make numerous threatening references to the UN. And at the end, you repeat the words "Screw Flanders." over and over again.
  • In Season 14 "Special Edna", when Bart has to write a ten-page essay about World War I and he gets too distracted to finish it, his end result is his report containing only four pages of report and six pages of ads.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Played with in "Procrastination", where Spongebob is tasked with writing an 800-word essay on what not to do at a stoplight. After stalling until the last minute, he realizes he can just start listing everything he did up to that point... which technically is on-topic, because the assignment was so ridiculously open-ended.
• Total Drama Island: In "Basic Straining", Chef demands to be called "Master Chief" while he's hosting the show and makes all the contestants write a three hundred word essay about how much they love him. Duncan just writes, "I love Master Chief Hatchet because he is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very..." Duncan says he meets the exact word requirement, but this doesn't make Chef any less angry.
• Double Subverted in The Weekenders: Lor has an assignment with a long page-minimum and a specified font size. However, Carver points out no paper size was specified.

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