<p>My essay lengths:</p>
<p>Penn Essay: 598 words</p>
<p>CommonApp: 676 words</p>
<p>Is this an auto-reject? I didn't go off on a tangent or add extraneous information in my essays. If I had attempted to cut the word count, my essays would have lost value.</p>
<p>My Penn essay was around there. I’d definitely try to cut the Common App essay down to at least under 600. Nearing 700 is a shaky territory.</p>
<p>Penn is fine.</p>
<p>Common app you need to shorten. It said 250-500, not ~500! and even for ~500 basically implies 600 max.</p>
<p>Good luck</p>
<p>I think that you should’ve gone back and rewritten your essay. The whole showing vs. telling thing is great, but telling is better if showing makes your essay long and bloated and annoying.</p>
<p>While not an automatic reject, I do not think you will help your cause by submitting such long essays, in particular the common application one. Why risk aggravating the person deciding whether you should be admitted by making them read an extra long essay? If you write well enough to write a great essay that is almost 700 words long, you should also be able to write a great essay that is 500-550 words long.</p>
<p>Well, it’s too late. I submitted my App 2 weeks ago. I guess I’ll just await my rejection because of 176 ****ing words…</p>
<p>Hopefully your essays are good enough so that the length will not be held against you. Even if the reader is somewhat irritated by the length, it is only one part of your application and it is extremely unlikely that it will, by itself, make a difference as to whether you will be admitted.</p>
<p>Well, it’s not like my essays were amazing, but they were quite good in my opinion (and in about ten other critic’s opinions)</p>
<p>The common app essay is suggested to be from 250-500 words, but it doesn’t have to be. Try focusing on the content, instead of the length. I know of people whose common app essays are around 1300 words but they still got in great schools!</p>
<p>^WOW. Really??? 1300 words…that’s a bit overkill. Yeah, I was told that you should really try to make sure that your essays are within the limits. They give you directions because they want you to follow them.</p>
<p>Can someone just tell me it’s okay so I stop worrying about it 24/7?</p>
<p>aww you’ll be fine 
as long as your penn essay was in a page
and they don’t do word counts
I’m 100% sure this will not hurt your chances at all DO NOT worry
now if they asked for 500, and u wrote 800, that’d be a problem
BUT THIS IS FINE
last year someone from our school submitted an 1000 word + essay to Harvard and other schools and got in…so…yeah I think it really depends on the content and ur other stuff</p>
<p>I have a question. My Penn essay was 500 words, I just double-spaced it. Is that a huge no-no?</p>
<p>dont worryyy Im sure they mean a page as in word limit
if you double space it they’re not going to reject u or even hurt your chances
the admissions officer from northwestern came to my school and said that she likes reading essays double spaced</p>
<p>Just FYI, this is the year they decided to bring back 500 word limits. So you can’t really use previous years as anecdotes since THEY did NOT have word limits. They did, but that was waaaay way long ago, and they just reintroduced it this year.</p>
<p>yeah…I know
just saying tho…
but everyone be nice and supportive, more panic/stress is the last thing we need
if uve sent in ur app
STOP worrying about it, about any aspect of it, dont even look at it anymore
ITS DONE
now work on a positive attitude</p>