<p>I have a question about personal essays. the common app gives a rough guideline: min 250 words.</p>
<p>is there an upper limit on who long the essay can be.</p>
<p>do highly selective colleges welcome long essays? Or is there a such a thing as too long an essay regardless of the internal coherency and the merit of the content?</p>
<p>Typically, shorter is better. It's a lot harder to write a short college essay than to ramble on for pages, but a shorter essay will more likely grab the readers attention and hold it through till the end. Also, the reader is probably reading thousands of essays, so they don't want to waste too much time on any of them.</p>