You could use a fill-in-the-blank item rather than an essay. Then you could insert the response into later question wording. You can adjust the size and allowable content of the blank to accommodate more text. Note that Excel and SPSS can only read in the first 255 characters of a fill in the blank response though. If you need to record more of the essay in your data files, let me know and I can explain a way to do that.

See: http://www.empirisoft.com/medialab/h...mtype.htm#fitb