"Playing It Safe with Winter Sports" sounds like a good focus, but if you spend seven pages on your glory-stories of skiing off cliffs and showing off for the guys or ladies and two pages on avoiding avalanches…your focus is probably bad. Make your focus clear and don’t let readers ask themselves why they’re reading the paper or what they were supposed to get out of it when they finish. This makes it look like you wrote the paper the night before the deadline.
An awareness of your focus will help you decide how to make your paper longer or shorter, according to your needs. If your paper is already twelve pages and you haven’t even gotten to your main point yet, you’ll want to narrow it and cover less. If you’ve finished your paper and you’re only on page six, you’ll want to broaden your paper.
For example: imagine you want to write a paper on the joys of snowshoing. By page four, you’ve covered how to do it, how to choose your gear, where to go, how to dress, and the history of snowshoing (which you hate to include because you don’t think your readers will be interested). You might choose to change your focus to winter back country sports and add cross country skiing, telemarking, and camping. You could even add information about avoiding safety and how to dress for the cold.
If you find yourself including information that doesn’t have to do with your focus, make an adjustment. Either broaden your focus to include it or remove it from your paper.