How Long Should A College Essay Be?

How Long Should A College Essay Be? Having a clear idea of the question is SO important to remain organized as you do your research. Okay -- that’s a bit of an extreme example, but the reasoning holds true. Before you start writing like a determined maniac, you need to also have an outline first -- otherwise, you could end up scrapping most or all of what you wrote in the first place. So go back to your screen, accept that the first draft is going to be DARN AWFUL, and challenge yourself to write that first sentence -- then another -- and another. So theoretically, you can have a paragraph consisting of one word plus punctuation marks. 1,000 words in direct speech would therefore mean you’d write way more than the five or ten paragraphs our initial guideline suggested. These include Times New Roman, Arial, Calibri, and Verdana. Many teachers will specify this, too, so be sure to check! The tendency toward perfectionism is the enemy of all progress. The biggest mistake I ever made was repeatedly re-reading everything I wrote, going back to edit, realizing I hated my writing, and then getting in the way of any progress I was making. I wrote an essay of 1550 words and it was barely 4.5 pages . This is a great guide, but people should be aware that these are just estimates. Finish by making a decision, tell the reader what the answer is. Start with something other than the cliche 'to conclude' or ‘ultimately.’ Teachers are tired of hearing those words, and often, they can be left out. Trust me -- you will get brownie points for addressing these points later in your essay. So make sure you know the content and collect your notes -- do whatever you need to prepare. This includes collecting your stationery and paper etc, so that before you know everything you want to write about. and constantly refer to it and use the keywords to show the reader/examiner/your teacher that you are addressing the question. Introduction and conclusion should not be more than one paragraph, and the body can be about 3 paragraphs. The essay needs to answer the question or, you can say the topic assigned to you. A short essay should be of approximately words and 1 page to 2 pages. Page no. depends on the spacing between the lines. This is one reason why a teacher may give an assignment length in words instead of pages - page length can be faked by changing the margins and fonts. If you're asked to submit a paper with single spacing, you will be writing two-and-a-half pages. If you're using 1.5 spacing, it would be around three pages. Worse, all three of these answers reveal a lack of understanding of the marketplace in which writers are trying to sell storiesâ€"the same marketplace where we agents are selling stories. Go with ‘ultimately’ however if you feel like your conclusion is incomplete without this transitional phrase. If you can, save a nice interesting fact to hit the reader with in the conclusion. This is your chance to essentially say 'so basically I was right and the previous paragraphs are the proof of it'. Once your topic sentence is written, it's time to turn your notes into sentences to supporting the claim made in your topic sentence. The majority of your body paragraph should be backing up your paragraph’s point with evidence, facts and quotes. At the end of your paragraph, relate back to the question (don't forget your key-words) and make a judgment about this individual point in reference to your thesis. You’ve already determined what your three major points are and which notes/facts should support which points. Facts you’ve researched that don’t quite fit with your argument should be kept in another section -- that will be for your counter-argument. A short or brief essay is defined by its length and the depth of ideas which are presented in it. There is a limited word count for this type of an essay, so you need to make sure that you put in right words and ideas. Before moving on to know about an essay of short length, let’s learn a bit about “what is an essay? For direct speech, one for every time you change speaker . It’s a lot less cumbersome to skip a mention of the speaker than to add “said Mary” and “John said” after every direct quote. Along with these standard formats, you're likely to be assigned a standard font size, too. Get ready to see 12pt written somewhere in your teacher's instructions. Different fonts and different font sizes will affect the number of pages you write.