<p>why do they make it so that the words are liek bolded, size 8 font, and single-spaced. isnt it harder for them</p>
<p>It probably saves tons of paper with over 20,000 applications per year. After all, Stanford's mascot is a tree!</p>
<p>i think that's a convention of the common application. it's a real pain, because for my roommate essay I originally wrote it as a "letter" but it didn't fit in the space allotted by common app, even though the word and character count were under the limits.</p>
<p>I posted this elsewhere but this thread seems more appropriate. The program also deletes indentation (I think it ensures that each line begins with a char). I used an invisible zero length character at the start of each paragraph then indented.</p>