How Long Should an Essay Be? – A Data-Driven Answer

• College admissions essay – 200–650 words

• High school essay – 300–1,000 words

• Graduate school admissions essay – 500–1,000 words

• Undergraduate college essay – 1,500–5,000 words

• Graduate school essay – 2,500-6,000 words

Your teacher may issue an essay and you ask, “How long should an essay be?” and your professor replies with, “You decide.” There are two things you need to take away from this, first, it is probably busy-work that he or she is using to force you to revise a topic.

If it is an opinion piece on a single issue, then a healthy 400-word essay will probably be sufficient to express your opinion and justify your point. If you are practicing exam questions, then a 150-word essay or 250 words essay should suffice. If the question is obviously multi-faceted, such as “What are the reasons for the American civil war?” Then you are looking at thousands of words rather than hundreds.

How Long Is a Short Essay?

When considering how long a short essay should be, you need to consider the subject. If you are writing a biology paper, then a 250 word essay may be enough. If you are studying art history, then a short essay may include over one thousand words.

On the other hand, you need to consider the type of essay you are writing. For example, a three-paragraph essay can be as short as a 150-word paragraph or two under the right circumstances. On the other hand, a dissertation is going to be 12,000 or more words.

When thinking about the question, “How long is an essay?” Consider the essay structure or variety. For example, some people have scored A+ grades for fiction work that is no longer than 700 words. Some narrative essays have scored high grades for nothing more than a 250-word essay example. Then there are high scoring argumentative essays that have gone on for thousands of words and have scored unbreakably high scores.

How Long Should an Essay Be in an Exam – a Points Driven Answer!

During an exam, you may be given a few lines under each question to write your answer. Other times, you may be given a question and the paper says, “Write a 300-word essay or a 400-word essay.”

The worst types of essay questions ask you to write your answer and give you a whole page or more to answer. What is worse is when you see other students grabbing the extra paper when you have barely filled the space provided.

What do you do? How long is a short essay? Should you be writing a 3,000-word essay in an exam? The answer to the question “How long is a short essay be?” rests on how your paper is marked. The marking guide will specify how many marks you get for each point you raise, and then offer additional points for the higher use of English and so forth. Look at how many marks that section has on offer.

If your previous exam questions offered an average of one point per question, and each question offers around three/four lines of space for your answer, then translate that into your essay marks. For example, let’s say that the exam gives you 10 points for the essay section, you will probably be safe writing a 300-word essay with around 3 lines per mark. Then, strive to make ten points within your essay that would deserve marks, (1 mark per point made, make one point every three lines).

For example, if your exam question says, “Give the reasons why climate change exists,” and the exam offers ten marks for the question, then write a 300-word essay and give ten reasons why climate change exists at about two/three/four lines per reason.

How Long Should an Exam Essay Be – A Time-Driven Answer

Sometimes, the marks trick mentioned above doesn’t work because maybe your entire exam is an essay, or maybe the marking scheme is tiered so that the points you make do not translate into essay marks. If that is the case, then you can use the time limit to determine your word count.

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