<p>Is it ok if my supplement essay is 600 words long?</p>
<p>Taken from the Yale Admissons website (<a href="http://www.yale.edu/admit/faq/applying):%5B/url%5D">www.yale.edu/admit/faq/applying):</a></p>
<p>"My essays are more than 500 words each. Is that OK?</p>
<p>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>Take what you will from that.</p>
<p>If it's good and engaging, 600 words shouldn't be a huge problem.</p>
<p>That said, I will give you the advice that my dad has told me my whole life:</p>
<p>Anything you write can be shortened-- make every word fight for its life and don't fall in love with your own sentences. </p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>P.s. Mine was def. a bit over 500. Probably 550 I'd say.</p>
<p>Wow fringey, that was an amazing advice.</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>thanks, fringey323, I am going to borrow your dad's advice--make every word fight for its life!</p>
<p>I like to quote Mark Twain, who said: I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.</p>
<p>I write for a living and when I'm given a word count of 300 words for a sidebar I write 300 (give or take a handful, depending on the length of the words).</p>
<p>I'd rather an adcom finished reading an essay with the thought, "Wow, that was interesting--I could read a lot more of this kid's writing" than finished it with the thought, "whew, it's finally over!" Think of all the reading they do.</p>
<p>No problem :-)</p>
<p>I refused to let him read my essays, but I definitely heeded his advice. It also made my work stronger in the sense that no word went un-challenged -- so it was punchier than my originals by far.</p>
<p>Another good piece of advice is by Mary Oliver -- If you have to read it more than once in order to decide if you should change it, change it. It's clearly not working.</p>
<p>hmmm... I churned out 760 words for both my common app essay and my Yale supplement (fit them both on one page though).</p>
<p>I kept mine both around 500 words. Short n sweet (I hope).</p>
<p>I don't think it matters as long as you don't write them a novel or something... I think thats anywhere between 500 and 800.</p>
<p>Well, you have the Yale website advice, and you need to decide what to do. I would be wary of assuming that any advice on this site should supercede any college's stated instructions, however.</p>
<p>I agree with Ailey. However, my essay has quite a bit of dialog, and thus moves more quickly than a typically 564 word essay. It depends on the flow- if it's all block paragraphs, they're going to be able to tell a 500+ word essay.</p>
<p>My D counted the words and reworked until it was under 500. We are both first born rule followers and have no choice in these things. The time and skill required to amputate was worth the outcome.</p>
<p>My English teacher, whom I admire greatly even though he's crazy, yells at us for not respecting his length limits. We responded at first with "Why is it so important that we write papers within words of each other in length?"</p>
<p>Besides telling us to just do it because he asked us, he also said that those who wrote over the limit made it seem like they thought that their essay was so friggin' great they just had to talk more about it. </p>
<p>So, don't be one of those people, hehe.</p>
<p>I think if your essay uses a lot of short words like "the" and "it" frequently, you're obviously going to have more words than someone who uses "antidisestablishmentarianism" or something like that often. That said, I think as long as you stay on one page, single-spaced, you're fine.</p>