<p>Does anyone know whether the character limits for some essays include spaces?</p>
<p>All characters are included, whether it is a letter, number, a space, or a punctuation mark.</p>
<p>Yes–it includes spaces. It’s also crazy that some of the character limits don’t match the word limits set for the essays–so, for example, my son would write a 200 word essay that was too many characters when typed into the form. However, we found that if he pasted his essay in from MS WORD, he could override the character limit. This had to be done at the very end of the process, as any edits within the online form deleted characters. I’m not sure if it’ll work with this year’s form, but it’s worth a try. (NOTE: I’m NOT suggesting that you go over the word limit in the essay prompt–just giving a way to avoid the technical issue of words vs. characters)</p>
<p>The New York Times ran an article recently about “truncation” of essays on the college Common Application, which is filed online. <a href=“Common Application Users Find Glitch In Common, Too - The New York Times”>Common Application Users Find Glitch In Common, Too - The New York Times;
<p>I do not know if this happens with prep school essays. On the other hand, I would not assume that it doesn’t. If you abide by the character limit, there isn’t a problem, is there? It’s so weird to set a character limit, I assume the schools do it for a very good reason.</p>
<p>If you want to shrink your essay quickly, try this: first, cut the adverbs from your essay. Then, the adjectives. Adjust verbs as necessary. Look for any words you’ve repeated (of course, not "a, the, and, but…etc). In my own writing, I find if I use one unusual word more than once, it leads to a repetition which could be cut.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s that the schools have a reason for character limits; I think it’s the agency that does the online applications for the schools that makes that call because, as Periwinkle’s link points out, there’s a disconnect between character and word limits that needs to be corrected. On-line applications are still fairly new beasts, and clearly the kinks are still being worked out in transferring from real to virtual paper. Still, I don’t understand why the problem is so perplexing the the college rep. interviewed in the article. Why don’t they just increase the character limits? This seems like a no-brainer to me.</p>
<p>At any rate, pasting the essays in worked fine, they weren’t truncated on the pdf’s, and there was nothing on the pdf that the schools received to suggest that he’d gone over the character limit. Of course, there’s no guarantee that this year’s application will operate the same as last year’s.</p>