How Many Words Do You Need To Tell A Story?

When you open your computer and begin to draft an essay that needs to be 500 words do you think this is a lot or a little?

For some, the idea of having to tell a story in 500 words seems an impossible task. There is far too much to tell, far too much to cover, far too many things the reader needs to know.

When it comes to students applying for admission to selective colleges they have a choice, in many cases, between using the Common Application or The Coalition for Access and Affordability platforms. The latter is a newcomer to the admission world. Only about 40 colleges used it this year. The number will more than double for next year.

The word count for the Coalition application is 500 words. The Common Application  limit is 650 words. Is a longer essay better? Are those extra words a chance to tell a better story to convince admission readers that you are more than just a set of courses, grades, test scores, and activities?

Is longer better?

For those who wish to get a head start, here are the Coalition questions for 2017-2018:

Tell a story from your life, describing an experience that either demonstrates your character or helped to shape it.

Describe a time when you made a meaningful contribution to others in which the greater good was your focus. Discuss the challenges and rewards of making your contribution.

Has there been a time when you’ve had a long-cherished or accepted belief challenged? How did you respond? How did the challenge affect your beliefs?

What is the hardest part of being a teenager now? What’s the best part? What advice would you give a younger sibling or friend (assuming they would listen to you)?

Submit an essay on a topic of your choice.

The Common Application used to permit student to submit an essay on any topic but several years ago they got rid of it. I was not in favor of this move as there are some things that don’t fit within the prompts that would permit a student to show herself in the best way.

But for those who think not much can happen in 500 words I am posting here a piece by Eliot Weinberger:

In the Aztec empire, every fifty-two years, once in an average lifetime, the world was on the verge of coming to an end. The sun would no longer move, night would be eternal, and man-eating demons would descend to rule the earth. On that day all fires were extinguished, and floors were swept clean. Old clothes, the images of gods kept in the house, the hearthstones on which cooking pots were kept, mats, pestles, and grindstones were cast into lakes and rivers. Pregnant women were given maguey masks and locked in granaries; if the world ended, they would turn into monsters. That night, everyone dressed in new clothes, climbed onto terraces and rooftops; no one touched the ground. Children were poked and threatened, to keep them awake; those who slept would wake up as mice. In Tenochtitlan, the capital, eyes were fixed on the temple atop the Hill of the Star. There, at midnight, the priests were watching the stars   mats, pestles, and grindstones were cast into lakes and rivers. Pregnant women were given maguey masks and locked in granaries; if the world ended, they would turn into monsters. That night, everyone dressed in new clothes, climbed onto terraces and rooftops; no one touched the ground. Children were poked and threatened, to keep them awake; those who slept would wake up as mice. In Tenochtitlan, the capital, eyes were fixed on the temple atop the Hill of the Star. There, at midnight, the priests were watching the stars called Tianquitzli, the Marketplace, our Pleiades, to see if they would cross the meridian and ensure another fifty-two years of life. In the temple, a prisoner without physical blemishes, with a name meaning turquoise, year, fire, grass, or comet— words that denote precious time— was stretched across a flat stone with a piece of wood on his chest. As the Tianquitzli constellation crossed the line, a priest began furiously spinning his fire drill into the wood. A little smoke, a few sparks, and then, as the wood took flame, the prisoner's chest was slit open with an obsidian knife, his heart pulled out and set in the fire. Four bundles of tied wood, each with thirteen logs, were piled around him so that his whole body was consumed by flames.   As the bonfire became visible, the people slashed their ears and the ears of their children, scattering blood toward the flames. Messengers carried torches from the Hill of the Star to the principal temples, and from there to the palaces, and from the palaces, street by street, house by house, until the whole city was lit again. All night, relay runners carried the new fire throughout the empire. People threw themselves at the fire to be blessed with blisters. Children born in the night were given the name New Time. In the morning new mats were spread out, new hearthstones placed, incense lit, and honey-dipped amaranth seed cakes eaten by all. Quails were decapitated.  

Weinberger, Eliot. An Elemental Thing (New Directions Paperbook).


At 492 words, Weinberger’s essay gives us more information, told beautifully, and poetically than many cang ive us in hundreds of pages books. Weinberger is one of our greatest living essayists and he knows how details can, juxtaposed and then put together to create rhythm and vision, invoke the magic of a culture and history.

Great writers can make their words word be it a haiku, a sonnet or an epic. Can a student say persuasive things in 500 words. Of course. But it is an art and it does take time to craft a compelling story of any sort.

Tenochtitlan

Weinberger’s books are hard to classify—skip the table of contents and it would require an act of divination to surmise what the next set of pages will bring—and that seems to make them a difficult sell in his own country. His newest book, “The Ghosts of Birds,” is typically wide-ranging. The first half, made up of nineteen connected pieces, continues a serial essay—an open-ended work with refracting images and motifs—the first part of which appeared in 2007’s “An Elemental Thing.” The pieces in “Ghosts” include a catalogue of dreams about people named Chang, accounts of burial traditions used to keep the dead at bay, and “A Calendar of Stones”—twenty-eight descriptions of rocks in different times and places, numbered in accordance with the phases of the moon.

“You get a sense from his work of the extreme richness of global culture,” the writer Lydia Davis, whose work can be equally difficult to classify, told me.

from the New Yorker.