Filibuster: expanding text

What this does

Task menu ▸ Improve ▸ Filibuster (Expand Text)

The counterpart to shortening: the selected text is brought up to a word count you specify – longer than the original.

The name is meant honestly. A filibuster is a speech that fills time. The feature does not add content it does not have; it phrases what is there at greater length.

How to do it

1. Select the text.
2. Invoke Filibuster.
3. Enter the word count you want. The add-in tells you how many words the source text has.

If your number is outside the sensible range, the add-in tells you which range is allowed.

What it is good for

• Turning bullet points into written paragraphs.
• Bringing a section that is too terse up to the level of the rest of the document.
• Producing a draft you then cut back – some people find that easier than writing from a blank page.

What it is not good for

Ask for double or triple the length and the model has to invent substance to reach the word count. What comes out sounds right and is not necessarily so: invented examples, general assertions, figures with nothing behind them.

Stay in the range of one to one-and-a-half times the length, and read the result sentence by sentence for anything you could not substantiate.

For text with a prescribed minimum length, this is the wrong answer. It produces length, not content.