<p>Regarding the Admission Essays:</p>
<p>-Is ~ 750 words acceptable for the Long Essay, or is that way too much? What's the "cut-off" point beyond which an essay starts to go overboard - the site says that 550 words is OK and 1000 isn't, but not much else?</p>
<p>-How long, approximately, should the Short Essay be?</p>
<p>Thanks :).</p>
<p>My rule of thumb is that an essay shouldn’t go more than 10-15% above the word limit. So in my book, 550-575 words would be okay, but anything more than that is too wordy.</p>
<p>Okay, thanks ^^. How long do people usually make the Short Essay?</p>
<p>My short essays were about 106-107 words. I think that it says somewhere that they should be about 100 words each.</p>
<p>lol, my main essay was about 1000 words and I got in early. :)</p>
<p>^ ditto, albeit RA.</p>
<p>If I recall, mine was 770 words (admitted early). I think you should use as many words as you need. Try to cut it as close to 500 as possible, but if you find that you’re cutting out some of the meaning, leave it as is.</p>
<p>I may be too conditioned by graduate school to abhor extra words, but I am strongly against writing an 800-1000-word essay when the limit is 500.*</p>
<p>Remember that brevity is the soul of wit, et cetera. Write what you need to write, but you almost certainly don’t need 800 words. That doesn’t mean you’ll be punished if you go over, but pithier essays are often better essays.</p>
<p>(*Do you know how hard the NIH would laugh if you turned in a 20-page grant application when the limit was 10 pages? They’d laugh really hard as they threw your application in the trash.)</p>
<p>Hmm… I think I’ll try to make it <600 words, just to be on the safe side, and the Short Essay <110 words. Is it best to the write Long Essay on a math/science topic, or can it be a “significant experience/overcoming adversity/etc” essay, like the Common App one?</p>
<p>I stuck to the limits and got in RD.</p>
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<p>Me too. It’s just for me the MIT essay was an exception because out of all the schools that I applied to, I thought that MIT had the most lenient word count and I pushed that freedom a little bit more. (my MIT main essay was essentially just a long story)</p>
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<p>Well of course. Same goes for research papers (like Siemen Westinghouse’s hard page limit).</p>
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