Top Tips for Getting Your Word Count Right

If you write regularly as part of your living then one of the requirements you're going to be faced with is writing to a specific word count. If you're writing for a magazine then there will be different lengths for different types of features and there will be finite amounts of space that are available – so it's important to make sure that you can write to specification and that you don't end up going on far too long and filling up hundreds of pages or falling short and leaving load of blank space.

The same goes for websites. This is also something that comes in handy in essay writing, when writing CVs and when filling out applications, so even if you don't write for a living it's a skill worth cultivating. Here then we will look at some top tips for making sure your articles are the write length.

• Practice: When you're writing generally and not to a specific limit, it's worth using your word count anyway. Not only is it useful and interesting to know precisely how many words you've written, but it's also a good way to train yourself to get a 'feel' for how long an essay is going to be.

• Use Word: The modern Word in fact has a great feature which is a constantly updated word count at the bottom of the window. This lets you see how many words there are on the page at any one time as you write which means you are constantly aware of how much you've written and how much you have left to write.

• Don't Artificially Pad: If your articles need to be 1,000 words but you're struggling at 800, then the very worst thing you can do is to try and pad the articles out with unnecessary words that don't add anything to the article. So in other words don't write one hundred conclusions that all mean the same thing. You know – don't keep writing the same thing just slightly rephrased. Just writing the same thing but in a different way? That's a no, no... Don't.
Nope.

• Elaborate: What you can do though is to look back over your points and to see if any of them could be elaborated on further. If you have a short word count then you are going to be forced to give basically an overview of your points and then leave the reader to work out the implications themselves, but if the word limit is longer you can explore these ideas more deeply together and follow your trains of thoughts to their natural conclusion – but only if it adds something worthwhile to the article.

Have a muse on the different points you've made and you should find you come up with more genuinely interesting and valid points to make.

• Plan Ahead: Planning your articles ahead of time is an important way to know how much you've got left to say as well as how many more words you have left to write. This doesn't have to mean planning your articles the way you did at school – you don't need to write down an essay plan that you're then going to stick to rigidly.

Instead though you can come up with the plan just in your own head so that you know roughly what points you are going to make, what your conclusion is going to be and how you're going to structure it all. This way you can monitor as you go how much you've written and speed up or slow down accordingly.

• Change the Format: If your article is waffling on for ages and taking up too much space then another strategy to consider is simply altering the way you present the information. This might mean doing a 'top ten' count down for instance which allows you to jump from point to point without needing as much filler in between.

   Jeet

About the Guest Author:

The above article has been written by Jeet, who shares his internet knowledge through guest blogging. He owns an internet business, that provides guest posts and link-building services. Get the latest SEO tips and tricks on twitter @getlinkspro.