<p>On the common app site, it says the limit for the Why Northwestern? portion of the application is 250 words. I am having a terribly hard time with this, as I have a lot to say. Does anybody know if this is a strict limit? Will they prefer a short essay over a long one where I am able to say everything that I want to? Thanks!</p>
<p>250 should be enough, since they want you to kind of condense your thoughts. Narrow down the REAL top reasons you love NU. There are plenty of reasons to like NU, but what’s the reason that you’re picking it as one of your possible schools (or maybe your top school) out of thousands of schools in the US?</p>
<p>A Northwestern rep was at my school the other day and she said the 250 word count is a target, not a limit. So you can go over 250 words, but it still shouldn’t be much longer than that.</p>
<p>Thank you both for the info! I finally got it narrowed down to 259, so I think that’ll be fine.</p>
<p>Yeah that should definitely be fine. Worst comes to worst: 9 words get cut off, and it doesn’t change much, but I don’t think they just cut it off</p>
<p>How many excess words do you (anyone) think is acceptable? The Common App accepts any document under 500KB. Will they count the words for each one, or only if they seem too long? Mine is 270 right now and I love it the way it is. I’m not sure what to do.</p>
<p>I think that should be fine, I wouldn’t worry about 20 extra words. I’m sure I could find something to cut (3 years of newspaper will do that to you) but I don’t think it’s worth cutting if you love it and it’s not much over.</p>
<p>As long as those 9 or 20 words are meaningful to you and CANNOT be replaced or the essay cannot “work” without them, go for it!</p>