The Excess Accumulation of Statements

Have you ever tried to lengthen a paper because the requirement was 3-4 pages and you said what you needed to in 2? Did you use longer ways of saying a certain sentence, or did you add extra "reinforcement" sentences that basically say what you already did, creating irrelevant and repetitive nonsense? I myself haven't really had a problem with making my papers longer, however, I believe that creating a paper "length" requirement can sometimes reduce the quality of the assignment. I was taking notes for AP biology on the chapter talking about the structure of a plant. In the definition of an axillary bud, it talked about a "lateral shoot" and then added on, "commonly refered to as a branch". I thought that was funny because I could picture people calling branches "lateral shoots" in an effort to sound more intelligent, and used in a paper if there was length involved. QUANTITY DOESN'T ALWAYS MEAN QUALITY, PEOPLE. I get so annoyed when people ask, "How long is your paper? Mine is about 5." I'm just like, "Okay that's great. So you wrote 2 more pages than the required. It could all be a bunch of *insert inappropriate word here*. If anything, I would focus on cutting down excess pages to see if there are more concise and clear means of saying what I have written.
Because students may feel pressured to have the paper be x length long, or x number of words, they may find themselves stretching out their sentences instead of efficiently creating sentences with concise words. They might even turn to being "Thesaurus happy" and using the thesaurus to look for a new "bigger" word in place of almost everything. For example, take the sentence "I used a pen to write my paper." In "this essay needs to be 4 pages" mode, the sentence could be "I grasped the ink spewing thin, cylindrical writing implement lightly and began to scribble the roman alphabet into organized rows on my thin wooden sheet." No no no that is bad. I know this is a bit of an exaggeration, but I'm pretty sure almost any student can relate/knows someone guilty of this. Teachers should not find that QUANTITY is what matters, quality is much better. I know a lot of teachers have already discoved this, but it should be reinforced. I would personally rather read a paper that may be a little short rather than a paper that is long and begins to sound like blah blah blah.It's falling on deaf ears.