<p>right now, both my essays are 509 words - I can't cut down on words anymore. Will they accept 509-word essays? Or are my essays going to be cut off?</p>
<p>If you submit your essay via the internet commonapp.org will cut your essay to exactly 500 words. 9 words over should be okay if you submit the application via usps.</p>
<p>My essay on the common app. was like 520 words. 509 should be fine, just make sure you look at the .pdf of how your app. will appear before submit the app. to make sure nothing gets cut off.</p>
<p>Yoshi, I'm not sure where you got that. Essays online are cut short at 6000 CHARACTERS, not 500 words. The 500 words is just a general guideline, they really have no way of counting. Although they know about how long 500 words should be.</p>
<p>eek! my essays are around 586 and 560 words .. I'm still trying to cut them down, but do you think that's too much?</p>
<p>586 is too long, I think. +/- 10% would be okay, but over that seems like it probably could use some editing. But if it's really all necessary to get your point across, go for it. If you really have something to say and it's not just excessive verbage (I hate that word), going overboard the essay isn't going to kill your app.</p>
<p>Here's my opinion. If you can't get your essay down to 500 words, it's too complicated or too wordy. If you COULD get it down to 500 words but want to add a few more so it sounds pretty, at least don't surpass 510.</p>
<p>^^^LOL are you kidding me guys. Word limits are put in place to ensure that applicants don't write like 2,000 page manuscripts or something, not to prevent people from composing excellent 570 word essays or whatever. I heard directly from a YALE REGIONAL REPRESENTATIVE that word limits aren't enforced strictly at all and are given merely as a guideline for applicants.</p>
<p>Okay, this is from the Yale website:</p>
<p>My essays are more than 500 words each. Is that OK?
We ask that you respect the word limits we suggest. Will we read the words beyond 500? Yes. But if your essays are much longer than 500 words, understand that you will not help yourself by seeming to have ignored our request.</p>
<p>At the info session I went to, they say to try to keep it around 500 words, or that another good guideline was seeing if it could fit on a single page.</p>
<p>I have to warn though...it seems at Harvard, the essays are scanned in even if you mail the app in and then the words are all counted, after which words above the limit are excised at random from the essay. I found out the hard way...</p>
<p>"I have to warn though...it seems at Harvard, the essays are scanned in even if you mail the app in and then the words are all counted, after which words above the limit are excised at random from the essay. I found out the hard way..."</p>
<p>What the hell? Where'd you hear that?</p>
<p>that makes no sense, but it could be really hilarious.</p>
<p>"I am a believer in God" -> "I am God"</p>