<p>If we're only a few words over the limit (less than 10) then it should be ok right?</p>
<p>Definitely. MIT’s word limits are more suggestive and less strict than those of a lot of other schools (eg: Yale).
I think some people believe in going either only 5% or only 10% over, but the general idea of those rules is to not egregiously ignore the limit you’ve been given. Fewer than 10 words is not over by very much :). If you want to be super exact, when it’s that few words, you could probably rephrase some sentences to get rid of of’s and the’s and be precisely 250 (or 100 if its a short essay) but don’t stress about a handful of words.</p>
<p>The average human reads ~250 words per minute. As long as what you say is meaningful and important to your application, the adcoms wont notice or care if your essays go over the limit.</p>
<p>They want you to do the best job presenting yourself and your situation. If you have to go over the word limit - even by a good amount - that will be fine.</p>
<p>^ I would add one thing though - you can go a good amount over the word limit, but the font size (at least online) becomes very small, and I think one of the ppl in the admissions office on CC said it’d be annoying to read the tiny font…</p>
<p>Hm… that’s interesting. I applied EA, but the 250 word essays say 200-250 words, so I assumed that they really wanted something within that range.</p>
<p>Mine were 255, 277 and 275. I’m verbose. When I was worried, I consulted the blog and it seemed to me from those that my essays were alright. MIT apparently thought they were alright too.</p>
<p>Mine were ~240-310. Don’t worry about the length.</p>
<p>Word count = count words with 3 or more than 3 alphabets word ? rite ??</p>
<p>^^^ whatever word processor you’re using should have a ‘word count’ feature. If you don’t have a word processor, you’re using a computer, so I’m going to assume that you can google ‘OpenOffice.org’ and download it.</p>
<p>^^^ i knw tht duh!!</p>
<p>Does the word limit on activity description have to be strictly adhered to? I go to save and am getting an error: Activity description exceeds the allowed length. Please edit your response. </p>
<p>Didn’t get that with the essays=/</p>
<p>@Blitzer - </p>
<p>If you’re getting that error, than yes, you’ve exceeded our limit (by quite a bit!) </p>
<p>As for everyone else - </p>
<p>EphemeralEternal is correct. The longer your essay gets, the smaller the text gets. At a certain point it will cut you off for good. </p>
<p>Don’t rely on the text getting smaller! Small text is difficult to read. If you’re going to the small text size you’ve probably said too much. Verbosity is a skill but also a crutch; show us you can walk without it :)</p>
<p>Hello, I have been deferred through EA and am submitting a supplemental essay about why I want to go to MIT. I was wondering roughly if there is any word limit, as my rough draft is currently around 750 words, but it would be very hard to cut this down without diminishing the meaning</p>
<p>@dreamer - I don’t think there’s a definitive word limit, but 750 is a little excessive imo. :3</p>
<p>I’d read what the adcom said on MIT blog (in fact we have a coupe staff here on CC). They want you to be concise with your thoughts. In reality no one would spend 1 hour with you on a topic when it can be done in 1 minute. I would say make it concise but powerful enough that makes people remember you.</p>