<p>When I previewed my common application before submitting, I noticed that some of my words were sticked together so I went back to give them spacing. However, every time I added spacing, the counter suddenly went up 778 words (my original essay included 608 words). I was forced to submit them and when I looked at the preview file again it seemed so disturbing. Do I need to email the school about this?</p>
<p>Have you submitted your application already? If not, you need to continue editing until the essay is within the 650 word limit. (And for all future schools where you apply, of course you’ll need to unlock your essay and fix it.) If you delete and then replace the space at the end of every single line you may find that the word count normalizes.</p>
<p>If you have already submitted, look at the pdf version of what you have submitted. It is available through your dashboard. What you see there is what the college will see, exactly. They will not have access to additional words that might have been cut off. If your essay was cut off and submitted, you might want to create a pdf version of the properly formatted essay and send it to the school by email with a note explaining the situation.</p>
<p>Thank you so much! I did submit my essay and it was within the word limit but I had to accept that some of my words had no space between them since I could not fix it due to the word counter. I just wonder if I should send them a much more well-formated version of my essay that has enough spacing</p>
<p>If I was in admissions this year, I’d appreciate getting a properly formatted essay rather than having to slog through the glop created by common app, so my personal answer to your question is yes, send it as a pdf by email with a sentence or two in the transmitting email explaining that it is identical to the one you submitted, but for the improved and corrected formatting. It may not help, but I don’t expect doing that would diminish your chances.</p>
<p>Open your essay in a text editor such as WordPad, then copy and paste from WordPad into the Common App essay box. This should fix your formatting issues without adding words. The Common App essay boxes seem to have trouble reading the extra formatting that Word type programs add.</p>