Basic Trope: Adding filler to a document so it meets a minimum length.
- Straight: Alice has to write a paper with at least eight hundred words. She makes it to seven hundred twenty words through legitimate effort, then finds ways to make each paragraph drag out a little longer.
- Exaggerated: Alice gets to five hundred words, writes two incredibly off-topic paragraphs, then spends the last hundred words elongating sentences.
- Downplayed:
- Alice gets to seven hundred eighty-five words after editing, so she rephrases a few sentences and adds prepositional phrases to bump the word count up to eight hundred.
- Alice falls just short of the word count, so she adds an extra paragraph that, while tangential, reasonably fits in with everything else.
- Justified: There's a penalty for going beneath the word count, which Alice would rather avoid.
- Inverted: Alice trims down a paper that's too long.
- Subverted: Alice goes back into her paper to add words. However, rather than filler, her edits are mostly there to add detail, or otherwise make the paper read better.
- Double Subverted: But she goes overboard and the paper becomes oversaturated with Word Cruft, Justifying Edits, Righting Great Wrongs, friggin' natter somehow, and even an Edit War. Note that she somehow added this all by herself.
- Parodied:
- Alice writes the word "very" five hundred times in a row.
- Every sentence has some form of Department of Redundancy Department.
- Alice adds empty sheets of paper to reach the page count.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice naturally writes very loquaciously. While she didn't consciously go in and add unnecessary words, the paper reads as if she had.
- Averted:
- Alice gets to the word count without adding fluff.
- Despite sitting below eight hundred words, Alice turns in the paper as is.
- Enforced: The episode about Alice writing a paper came up thirty seconds short, so a padding montage was added to fill up the remaining time.
- Lampshaded: "You just said write an eight-hundred-word essay, you never said it had to be good."
- Invoked:
- Alice's teacher, Carol, purposefully selects a word count too high to achieve without doing the necessary research or adding fluff, so she can discern which students fall in either category.
- "I don't have time! Just gotta fluff it up."
- Exploited: Bob creates paid software to test whether a puffed-up paper is likely to get docked for filler.
- Defied: "A good paper below the word count is better than a long paper that meanders around. I can live with this."
- Discussed: "I have a personal code. If I reach ninety-five percent of the word count while being concise, filling out the paper with fluff is okay. But if I'm not even close, I'd rather not make a dunce of myself."
- Conversed: "With how much time Alice has spent fluffing up that paper, she probably could have made legitimate improvements in less time."
- Implied: Alice writes the last several words of her paper unusually quickly.
- Deconstructed: Carol deducts points from Alice's paper for the unnecessary and off-topic parts.
- Reconstructed:
- It's late in the term and, up until now, Alice has done well enough to secure a passing grade.
- The apparently unnecessary and off-topic parts tie into the assigned topic somehow. After a bout of Fridge Brilliance, Carol realizes this and restores the points she deducted from Alice.
- Played for Laughs: Alice's paper builds up some unusually long sentences, leading to funny word combinations.
- Played for Drama: Alice needs to get a C on this essay to pass the class. With not enough time to add to the paper "legitimately," she has to cram in the last several words as fast as possible without being obvious about it.
- Played for Horror: Alice fills out her word count with viscerally disgusting material.
This Is the Part Where... most people head back to the main page for Padding the Paper, although alternatively, some will click the link at the top of the page, which is perfectly serviceable, but generally seen as an unnecessary inconvenience (Troper 20XX). The End.
