Autobiographical Essay

<p>So my application for EA Fall'11 is complete, my transcripts and letters of rec already sent in, leaving my essay the only thing not yet submitted. I feel pretty confident with my essay, but the length is the only thing that worries me. The highest number of words i noticed in older threads was 2,500.</p>

<p>My total word count is 3,133 words. </p>

<p>Is that too long? I have gone through it a hundred times (not even kidding) trying to cut it down, but I feel like everything is too important to cut. I realize how important the essay is to the strength of my application. Did anybody else submit a long essay? Am I gettin' all worried over nothing? Please help! hahaha</p>

<p>it’s definitely hard to say without seeing the essay. in fact, it would probably still be hard to say after seeing it, since one obviously wouldn’t want to extract anything that you saw as essential to your narrative. i feel your pain–i’m something of an obfuscator and have had ‘word limit anxiety’ all my life. </p>

<p>anyway, i’m not truly in the position to advise you–my college essays have historically been pretty weak–but i’d go with your gut on this one and keep the extra pages. </p>

<p>that seems to be the spirit of the application as i romanticize it, anyway…to offer a panoramic sense of self, oddities and all, and to let the chips fall where they may.</p>

<p>good luck.</p>

<p>BTW: you may also want to show your essay to a relative or friend to see if he/she agrees that everything in it is important. i know you’ve been working hard to do exactly that, but as a writer (and again, let this overly verbose response stand as proof) it’s easy to fall in love with sentences that aren’t contributory to a text’s overall purpose. if fresh eyes can help you conclude that some passages or even that some individual words aren’t relevant, you’ll be above the word count by that much less and will find sending it to be that much easier. :)</p>

<p>I think one of the things that the essay examines is the extent to which you can execute a task, within the parameters that’re given to you, in such a way that it adds dimension to your application. If you’re beyond the word count, cut it down. </p>

<p>I’ve worked as an editor before. If you think it can’t be cut down, I’d like to see it.</p>

<p>Disclaimer: I totally agree with hellojan, as per usual.</p>

<p>However, my essay was over by about 500 words and I was accepted. Whether they overlooked my gross disregard for guidelines or they appreciated the total length of my essay, I’ll never know. If you really can’t tell your whole story without cutting down the length, I’d go ahead and submit.</p>

<p>thanks for the feedback fm93, hellojan, and AMorrison!</p>

<p>i’ve cut it down (from 3,133) to 2,761 so far. i’ll keep hacking away at it.</p>

<p>with a good amount of feedback i’ve cut it down to 2,599 words.</p>

<p>please forgive my anxiety on trying to get this perfect, but did everyone title their essay when they submitted it?</p>

<p>I did not. I simply had my name and identifying information at the top and a word count.
I also had the prompt itself before the body of the essay. </p>

<p>Good job editing. It’s a skill that will serve you well here: in a lecture class of 200 people, when professors tell you to summarize 250 pages in 750 words, they mean 750 words, not 10 pages. </p>

<p>Good luck.</p>