How To Writing A Research Essay The toughest part of the essay, for me, was taking all the information I had gained and reduce it to a mere few pages essay. After all, quality is better than quantity. I feel that if I shortened my essay, it would be weaker because I couldn't include everything that I had researched. This would mean that much of the time I spent and the information I had gathered in my research was going to waste. Reviewing the finished product, I realized that my shortened essay did in by half the pages did what my old one could not do in a few hundred -- it made a concise, focused argument. By focusing my essay, I was able to includ