<p>For the optional essay #2, would it be terrible if my essay was 600 words?</p>
<p>This thread discusses essay lengths (and exceeding them). While this does not specifically address the "600 vs 500" question, you may extrapolate as you wish from Ben Jones's words in that thread:
[quote]
In my blog I did say "50 words over the limit isn't a big deal, don't worry about it. People who totally ignore the limit and submit 1000 words, however, are telling us something about their ability to write a concise essay..." In other words, it's not a strict limit, but don't abuse that policy - the reader(s) won't appreciate it if you do.
[/quote]
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<p>Haha, somebody should make a graph which plots essay length on the x-axis against a scale from good to bad on the y-axis. </p>
<p>Perhaps Timur would like to intervene at this point with a relevant Paint drawing? :)</p>
<p>Lol, I figured I'd give this a shot</p>
<p>Inspired by mollieb and free time :p</p>
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<p>Lessons from the graph. Try to clip it by 50 or so words like Ben mentioned ;)</p>
<p>I drew the same conclusions.</p>
<p>That is absolutely brilliant! :-)</p>