Thoughts on Word Limits?

[ERinspired]

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How important is it to be close to the word limits for secondary essays? So far I've been working on RowanSOM's and I'm falling significantly short (165/500 and 276/750) but I don't feel like I have anything else meaningful to say. I know that being succinct is good, but I feel like I may be too short?

(The threads I've found using search are about going over the word limit...)

 

[Medschoolornah]

if u said everything u needed to say then its good. just make sure u answer the question sufficiently and ur fine. its a word limit. not a word minimum for a reason

 

[sharpstickie]

if u said everything u needed to say then its good. just make sure u answer the question sufficiently and ur fine. its a word limit. not a word minimum for a reason

I second this exactly. Write what you feel is significant, the rest is just fluff. They don't put those word limits there as a challenge to see if you can get there, but rather they feel the prompt can be responded to within that word count (or they just don't want to read thousands of words of fluff).

 

[futurexray]

less is more

 

[Goro]

It is a very common pre-med neurosis, if not actual hysteria, that every prompt has to be filled to the maximum in wordage.

They don't.

How important is it to be close to the word limits for secondary essays? So far I've been working on RowanSOM's and I'm falling significantly short (165/500 and 276/750) but I don't feel like I have anything else meaningful to say. I know that being succinct is good, but I feel like I may be too short?

(The threads I've found using search are about going over the word limit...)

 

[samac]

Most of mine were 200-300 out of 500 on various secondaries and I was totally fine.

152 seems pretty short but if you said all you need to you're fine.

 

[ChelseaPsyche]

Edit: thanks all for answering this question!

 

[Mr Roboto]

I misread a 500 word limit as a 500 character limit.

That secondary essay got me into my first choice school.

Essays should be like skirts--long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to keep things interesting.

 

[Pandaplumb]

less is more

Really good point. Less is more because it reduces rambling/repetition. I would make sure to put in sufficient thought into your answer before writing that way everything is short but still very much to the point.

 

[sharpstickie]

The reason I loved my Chemical Writing class in undergrad because you were encouraged to not write a certain number of words, but have the content in a readable format.