[roel_v]

I had to write a 10k word undergrad final paper for law school (in Europe, law school is a regular university study, with a 3 year LLB and 1 or 2 year LLM). At around 8k or so, I went to my supervisor and said 'look, I've said everything I wanted to say, and in a drawn out way already which I' not happy about. If I have to add more, I will need to start another topic, and I'd rather keep this paper focused and continue that other subject in another paper. What do you want me to do?'. Then my supervisor said 'I'll get you in on a dirty secret in legal writing. When you need to hit a word count, you play with the precedent citations here and there. Go back to your desk, cite an extra sentence before and after every citation you have in there, and tadaa you're done'. Turned out that I had to include an extra paragraph here or there but still, golden advice :) And somewhat applicable to other fields as well, if you build in this sort of safety net from the start...

[ModernMech]

Reminds me of page count requirements in middle school. I'd write 4 pages, and in order to get to 5 I'd make every period and comma a higher font size. This was after they figured out my line spacing and margin tricks.