What To Do About AI Essay Padding: I Turned It Into A Daily Bell Ringer Game Teachers Love
It was 7:30 on a Tuesday night last April, and I was sitting at my kitchen table grading 10th grade argumentative essays, a half-eaten bowl of cheddar Goldfish next to my laptop. I clicked open the third essay of the night, and scrolled through 120 words of opening before I realized the student hadn’t actually said anything yet. “In today’s modern world that we currently inhabit, social media has emerged as an increasingly powerful technological force that shapes the daily experiences of countless young people across the entire globe, and there are many competing perspectives on what impact this tool has on the developing adolescent brain.” That’s 120 words, and the student still hadn’t taken a position. All I learned was that they thought social media matters.
I’d seen this more and more over the previous year. Half my essays had this same vague, bloated language. Some kids admitted they’d used a chatbot to draft their outline and just left all the extra wording in because it sounded “official.” Others didn’t even realize how much fluff they’d left in—they’d been taught longer essays get better grades, so more words felt like a win. I was tired of writing “cut fluff” in the margins 20 times per essay, and I didn’t want to spend another lecture talking about concision that half the class would forget by the next day. I also didn’t want to ban AI drafts; kids are going to use the tools available, and fighting that doesn’t teach them anything.
I needed a new bell ringer anyway. My old vocab matching routine had gotten stale, and kids were dragging their feet getting to class at 8 a.m. I wanted something 5 minutes, low-stakes, that got them talking right away. That weekend, while I was folding soccer uniforms for my middle schooler, I threw together the first set of slides. I copied 10 bloated paragraphs from my recent anonymized student essays, one per slide, and made up three simple rules: One, cut as many words as you can. Two, you can’t change the core meaning or the writer’s main point. Three, the person who turns in the clearest, shortest version wins a mini Snickers from my desk jar.
First day, I pulled up the 120-word social media opening I’d graded earlier that week. Kids pulled out a scrap of paper or their notes app, and got to work. Three minutes later, I called on volunteers. A quiet kid named Javi, who rarely raised his hand for anything, went first: “Social media’s impact on teen mental health needs closer examination.” That’s 17 words. The class murmured, that was good. Another kid, Mia, cut it even more: “We need to examine how social media affects teen mental health.” 12 words, no meaning lost. We voted, Mia got the Snickers, and class moved on. I didn’t think much of it after that, just a new warm-up.
By the end of the month, I noticed a change. The essays I was grading had 30% less bloat on average. Kids were crossing out extra phrases in their drafts before turning them in, and a few even scribbled “is this padding?” in the margins next to sentences they weren’t sure about. I shared the slide deck in our department group chat, just a quick “made this warm-up for cutting fluff, feel free to steal it” and that’s when it spread. The 11th grade history teacher started using it to trim bloated DBQ introductions. The biology teacher adapted it for lab report conclusions, cutting vague phrases like “this experiment sort of indicates a potential trend” down to clear claims. Now half the teachers in the building use it as their daily bell ringer.
What I’ve learned from this is that the problem with all that padding isn’t that it’s generated by AI—it’s that most kids don’t know how to spot it. They’ve spent years being told to hit a specific word count, so adding extra words feels like the right move. AI just amplifies that bad habit, because it’s trained to write in that vague, formal style that people think “academic writing” is supposed to be. This game doesn’t shame anyone—we use anonymized paragraphs, so no one gets called out for bad writing. It turns a critical editing skill into a low-stakes competition, which makes it stick way better than any lecture I’ve ever given.
For other teachers or parents who want to try this, it doesn’t take any fancy prep. If you’re a teacher, just pull one bloated paragraph a week from your own student submissions, strip the name off, and put it on the board. If you’re a parent helping your teen edit a college essay or a term paper, you can play this at the kitchen table after homework. Pull up their opening paragraph, and say “let’s see how many words we can cut here without changing what you want to say.” No fancy materials, no expensive curriculum, just 5 minutes of practice. I’ve had three parents of my students tell me they started doing this, and it took away all the fighting about editing—instead of a parent saying “this writing is messy,” it’s a shared challenge.
It’s not a perfect fix. I still get essays full of padding, and there are still a lot of big questions about how to teach writing in a world where tools can draft a whole essay in 10 seconds. It doesn’t solve every problem that comes with student use of new writing tools. But it’s a small thing that works, right now. Last week, a teacher from a district 45 minutes away emailed me asking for a copy of the slide deck, after one of our teachers mentioned it at a regional workshop. She wrote back an hour later saying her 8th graders were already asking when they get to play again. That’s enough for me for now.
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