Thoughts on handling word count for college application essays
So you’ve written a solid draft and you’re pretty committed to your ideas for this essay (Common App, supplementary essays etc.). One problem. You’re way over the word count. How should you approach this? At some point, everyone passes through this phase. We have some thoughts from years of working with students.
How to cut words
1. Check for repetition
Avoiding repetition isn’t the goal of your first cut. After you’ve made all your key points, though, this is an easy first win. For example - did you write “high school” or the name of the college multiple times, and are all the mentions required?
Perhaps you’re writing about community or the subject that you most enjoyed in school. Did you repeat “is the subject I most enjoy” or something similar? Does it have to be that way? Can you just… say the subject in a word and move on?
2. Transitions
You have paragraphs. You know they need to link together. You likely baked in transitions at beginnings and ends. And these likely weren’t optimized the first time round. Within reason, can you change things like “Another thing I did was” to “Additionally” or “One thing I’ve learned is” to “I learned” or “my takeaway was”?
3. Lists
You probably had to give examples of how exactly you participated in something or which groups you may have worked with. And the way you set up a long listing sentence could have been… suboptimal. Can you check and optimize the structure of the list? Are there too many examples? We don’t need to always follow the rule of threes, but it should be generally sufficient.
4. Success (not death) by a thousand cuts!
It’s unlikely you’ll magically find all your word savings in one paragraph. Cutting out entire paragraphs or chunks is the nuclear option. Try to avoid that.
Rather, hit your word count with savings from many little edits. You’ll be surprised how auditing each paragraph and saving 3 to 5 words on each pass through really adds up.
5. Talk it out
When you zero in on a chunk you know is wordy, pause and ask yourself what the key message here is. Try to say it a different way to yourself, focusing on using fewer words. Type that out and compare the word count now. You might surprise yourself.
6. Examine how you integrate quotes
When you’re not quite sure about the rest of your essay yet, you’ll likely integrate quotes in the most “basic” of ways, such as: University X’s motto states “{large pasted chunk here}” and I think this reflects well on what I value.
After the first draft, you should have a decent sense of the key parts. Try to narrow it down to something like “XYZ” and “ABC” truly stood out to me. If you’re adding quotes from things others have said, see if you can integrate them within sentences and avoid the structure of “So and so told me…”.
Some additional things to consider when editing
1. Varying sentence length and structure generally aids readability
So simply hitting the word count doesn’t mean you’re done. Check to see how the readability has changed. Have your sentences become too terse and robotic sounding? You may have to “spend” some words or keep a few wordier parts to make things flow well.
For example, we shouldn’t be reducing all transitions to single words like “therefore” and “consequently”. You also need to have sufficient buildup in the longer essays (things beyond 100 word straight answer situations). Your word count budget has to account for this.
2. Balance the use of details
You may well have gone from lacking enough examples to having too many. Once you do get the word count down, don’t feel pressured to “use” any extra words to squeeze in more examples. Once your point is made, more detail can be overkill.
3. Use a tool to check your word count at the end
By this point, the difference is only a handful of words, but different submission systems may count words differently from Google Docs or Word. Try something like WordCounter to make sure you’re on track.