Character count on AMCAS wrong?

[TotalDomination]

Or am I messing smth up? Microsoft word is telling me my PS is 5300 characters but amcas keeps cutting off my last word... Am I not allowed to press tab for the beginning of each paragraph???? so confused

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[IncognitoGuy]

IIRC, paragraph breaks also count as characters. I would just find some sentences you can re-word/shorten and replace some words with shorter synonyms.

 

[OCDOCDOCD]

AMCAS counts certain whitespace characters differently than MS word. For example, a tab is 1 character in MS word but 4 characters in AMCAS. A hard return is 1 character in Word but 2 characters in AMCAS (and if you put a blank line between your paragraphs it counts as 4 characters). That's most likely where your extra characters are coming from. Get rid of the tabs and see if that puts you under the limit.

 

[SN12357]

Or am I messing smth up? Microsoft word is telling me my PS is 5300 characters but amcas keeps cutting off my last word... Am I not allowed to press tab for the beginning of each paragraph???? so confused

Cut and paste into notepad, not word, and clean up your spaces. Tabbing in word doesn't translate well into textboxes. It's better to not indent paragraph beginnings and instead put an empty line between paras.

 

[TotalDomination]

AMCAS counts certain whitespace characters differently than MS word. For example, a tab is 1 character in MS word but 4 characters in AMCAS. A hard return is 1 character in Word but 2 characters in AMCAS (and if you put a blank line between your paragraphs it counts as 4 characters). That's most likely where your extra characters are coming from. Get rid of the tabs and see if that puts you under the limit.

This...happened. HAHA. I just cut out a couple words and it worked out.

Thanks OCDx3!