<p>When they say "Please keep your essay under 500 words", how strict are they?</p>
<p>Will 550 be okay?</p>
<p>Also, anyone wanna read my new 550 word essay? :p</p>
<p>It’s not like they count the number of words on the page and automatically reject you if it’s over 500. You have to remember that admissions guys have to read A LOT of essays. You’ll want to make it easier for everyone. </p>
<p>you can PM me your essay if you want me to read it</p>
<p>Sure I’ll read it… Pm me.</p>
<p>I’ll be harsh because I find many people were too easy when I wrote my common app essay. I wish the people told truth about why it sucked lol.</p>
<p>I read another post on this forum that the general rule is within 20%. As said, admissions officers won’t copy/paste into word, run word count on it, and deduct 1% from your admissions chance for every word that it goes overboard. What they might do is see that the essay looks too long. But that is not a problem if you’re just over 50 words.</p>
<p>edit… although some schools like Caltech do have a character limit that prevents you from typing more. Meh.</p>
<p>from what Ive heard for commonapp, anything under 800ish is reasonable. Just make sure to utilize all your words, if you need more than 500 so be it.</p>
<p>I just wrote a 988 word essay. I didn’t do much editing during writing, so I know there are some good size chunks I can cut out. I don’t think I can get it below 500 though. would 700 or so be acceptable?</p>
<p>mine is just under 800 and no one has told me that it is unreasonably long</p>