<p>For the essay they want 500 words or less (I'm at 540 currently. Trying to cut things out), and for the short takes they want 25 words or less but they give us 175 characters. I've managed to answer each one within the character limit, but for all of them except one I'm at around 30 words. Will the fact that I have 5 extra words for each one look bad on my part? Personally, I don't like the whole word + character limit; makes more sense to me to just have one or the other.</p>
<p>For the 500 word essay, I would definitely try to get it to Yale’s desired length. That seemed to be stressed in the commonapp directions and on the admissions website; plus, I’ve found that shorter essays force you to make points very clear and precise, free of extraneous and superfluous information, and that’ll help the overall quality of the essay.
Short takes I think you have little more leeway. I went by character count and had no problems. I mean, it’s not like your adcom is going to be sitting there counting words; once again though, the more compactly and concisely you can make your points, the better shape you’ll be in.</p>
<p>Yeah, that’s how I’m thinking about it. I don’t think they’re going to count the words and make judgements from that. & Yeah. It’s actually the essay I’m using for Brown, but it works with the Yale/Harvard prompt as well (not that they really have a prompt) and all of them request it to be under 500 words. I’ll put my best effort into eliminating 40 words then :)</p>
<p>lol, mine is about 1000 words 
n I decide not to cut anything.</p>
<p>Do not cut from 540… Mine was about that and I was accepted EA.</p>
<p>Mmm, alright. I’m just worried because it seems everything I wrote for Yale goes over their limits by a bit. Except the ‘Why Yale?’ question.</p>
<p>Commonapp was 1000, supp was 550 odd… If it is good they won’t mind. If it rambles, they will be pi**ed. They say something like this somewhere on their website</p>
<p>Alright. Yeah, my common app had around 1050, but I managed to cut words so I’m at 950, and I’m debating about a sentence in it so I might be able to chip off a tad more. I don’t think I ramble in the supp, but the information is needed to give a good visual of the event I was talking about. Maybe you could take a quick read through it?</p>
<p>Yeah, why not… If you can send in next half hour or so can get it back fairly soon</p>
<p>If shorter is better, would 250 words be okay for the optional supplement essay? Or is that too short?</p>
<p>What about Engineering Essay ? How long should it be? Mine is about 600 words</p>