Write to your target.

It is 1am and Word says 2,047

The limit is 2,000. You are 47 over, which is fine, probably, because there is a ten per cent tolerance — you think. Somebody said that once. You cannot find where.

Then a worse thought arrives: does that 2,047 include the bibliography? Because if it does you are actually at about 1,700 and the essay is underweight. And if it does not, and the footnotes count separately, you might be at 2,300 and in real trouble.

This is the genuinely maddening thing about academic word limits, and it is not the limit. Every other counter on this site measures against a published number. Here, the number in your word processor and the number your marker counts are frequently different — and nobody tells you which one you are looking at.

The first thing to find is not your word count

It is your department's counting rule. It exists. It is written down somewhere in the module handbook, usually in a paragraph nobody reads until the night before, and it is the only authority that matters.

Conventions vary between institutions and between departments inside the same institution. But the common pattern looks roughly like this.

Footnotes are the one that catches people

In history and law, where a genuine second argument often runs along the bottom of the page, plenty of departments count footnotes — precisely to stop the word limit being quietly evaded by anyone willing to write half their essay downstairs.

In the sciences, where a footnote is usually just a citation doing paperwork, they are frequently excluded.

So it depends on your discipline, and this is the single most common source of a mismatch between a student's count and a marker's. It is also the one where the gap can be several hundred words, which is the difference between comfortable and penalised.

The ten per cent rule, and the half nobody mentions

Most institutions allow roughly ten per cent either side. A 2,000-word essay is usually acceptable anywhere between 1,800 and 2,200. Your 2,047 is fine.

Two things about that are worth knowing at a calmer hour than 1am. It is not universal — some departments apply a hard ceiling with a penalty beyond it, commonly a deduction of a grade band, and a few simply stop reading at the limit. That last one is rare and worth checking for rather than discovering.

The other half gets less attention. Coming in under rarely attracts a formal penalty, so students treat it as free. It is not. A 1,500-word answer to a 2,000-word question is usually a thin argument, and it gets marked as a thin argument. The penalty is simply administered through the grade rather than through a rule.

Words to pages

A perennial question, and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on formatting. As a working figure: 12pt Times New Roman, double-spaced, one-inch margins gives around 250 words per page. Single-spaced, roughly 500. So a 2,000-word essay is about eight double-spaced pages.

If a brief asks for pages rather than words — still common in American institutions — work backwards from the required formatting and then write to the word figure. Page counts are trivially gamed with margins and line spacing, which is exactly why most markers stopped trusting them and started counting words instead.

Cutting 200 words without losing the argument

Being over is more common than being under, and the instinct is to delete a paragraph — which almost always costs you a point you needed. These recover more, with less damage:

• Delete the throat-clearing. "In this essay I will argue that…" can usually just become the argument. "It is important to note that" has never once been important to note. Two or three of these is fifty words and the prose gets better as it shortens.
• Paraphrase a long quotation. A 60-word block quote often becomes fifteen words of summary and a citation. It recovers more than anything else on this list — and paraphrasing demonstrates comprehension in a way that quoting conspicuously does not, so you gain twice.
• Unpack the nominalisations. "Made an assessment of" is "assessed". "Conducted an investigation into" is "investigated". Academic prose is thick with these, each one costs three or four words, and every single removal makes the sentence stronger.
• Find the summary paragraph in the middle. Most essays restate their own argument about two-thirds through, usually because the writer lost the thread and was reassuring themselves. The conclusion is already doing that job.
• Hunt the intensifiers. "Very significant", "quite clearly", "extremely important". They lengthen the sentence and weaken it at the same time, which is a rare achievement.

Things people actually ask

Related: the complete word count guide, how to cut word count, words to pages, citation generator.