<p>As the title intimates, my essay is 83 words over the word limit. How bad is this? I can try to remove more, but I like how it is now and feel that deleting more would hurt its effectiveness. </p>
<p>So, is being 83 words over bad? Should I work to get rid of the words over the limit?</p>
<p>Currently, the common app does not cut off after 500 words though the do have plans in the future. No adcom is going to spend time counting your words. </p>
<p>Let your essay sit for a week or so and then review it and see if you can cut more. If not, and it all fits on one page single spaced, put spaces between each paragraph if you can, then I wouldn’t make yourself crazy. </p>
<p>The advice my son got last year was to make sure it fits on one page.</p>
<p>I spoke last week with an admissions officer at a major university. They work all electronically in that particular office - no paper. She said that if you go over the count, she never sees the excess words. What she sees just truncates at the word count. She reads many essays that stop somewhere before the end, and if you said something brilliant at the end, or pulled it all together, she never sees it.</p>
<p>That is interesting fieldsports. I actually wonder how that would happen unless the common app cuts it off and is not warning the students. I believe their plan in the future is to give the students an alert message. </p>
<p>I can’t imagine any admissions office had their IT guys spend time modifying what they get from the common app to cut off the essay. </p>
<p>It is likely all schools only look at the electronic versions of a student’s common app which is why students must check print preview before they send.</p>