<p>Common App is counting my 150 word Stanford essay as 157 words. It has counted essays over by 1 or 2 words before, but never this many. I already pared the essay down to the bare minimum; I can't cut one more word, let alone seven. Does anyone know how to fix this? Please help!</p>
<p>Don’t put a space after the periods to start a new sentence or a comma to start a new word. Otherwise you’re going to have to cut some words out.</p>
<p>The problem is in hidden codes found in the spaces, most likely at the end of lines or paragraphs. Go to the end of each line of text (not each sentence, each individual line) and delete and replace every space.</p>
<p>Thank you! That’s what I’ve done before, but this time it was actually because of my dash formatting. I got it fixed. Thanks for the help!</p>
<p>Seven is a lot of dashes for a 150 word essay. Was that really it?</p>