Writing Sample Length?

[EJD]

Hi all!

Now that I've narrowed down my choices, I've been working on polishing up my writing sample to submit to schools, but now I'm struggling over length. I'm applying to UNC Chapel Hill, University of Georgia, UCLA, and Cornell to the Linguistics (or Indo-European Studies) departments, hoping to concentrate in historical linguistics. For my writing sample, I'm using my senior thesis, which is 39 pages long, but that's including the title page and two-page bibliography, so really it's 36 or so (not really a huge difference, I guess!). I thought I had read on at least one of these school's sites that the writing sample length should be between 10 and 20 pages, but looking through them again, I see no page guidelines, except on UNC's, which suggests a "short term paper" as an optional submission (I'd still like to submit a writing sample here, though).

I've had some friends and former teachers read my piece to give me suggestions on the best parts to keep, but now that I seem to have imagined the page limits, I suppose I can submit my whole 39-page thesis to most of my schools. However, I'm wondering if this is a good idea. I know that the admissions folks probably don't have a huge amount of time to read everyone's entire paper. However, I've been a bit put out having to take out any part of my thesis (as I'm sure most folks can identify with!).

My topic was tracing the development of literary self-defense and literary insults in the satirists and epigrammists Lucilius, Catullus, Horace, Persius, Martial, and Juvenal. My friends and my high school Latin teacher, whom I had read my paper, suggested that to fit into the 10-20 page limit range, I take out Catullus and Martial, since I had to do a bit of explaining in the introduction as to why I was including those two epigrammists in this survey of mostly satirists (because those two had fantastic insults, obviously). My former Latin teacher did say this would be a tragedy, though, but this edit made the most sense, ha ha! I agreed with this, but now I'm wondering if I can submit my whole paper anyway, since I don't have explicit page limits. Catullus and Martial were two of my favorite sections in this paper, and probably the two authors I have the most knowledge on out of all the folks I wrote about. My thesis advisor, while I was writing my thesis, did say including Martial in this study made my paper unique, as well, since studying all these authors together wasn't entirely common (taking his word on this, maybe he was making it up, ah ha ha!).

So, what I want to ask you all, do you think I should go ahead and submit my whole 39 pages to my schools? Would it be a better idea to submit the revised version of only Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal (which still clock in at about 26 pages, so still not super short!)? What about UNC's request of a "short term paper" - is my revised 26 pages still to long?

Thank you for your help! Everyone was super helpful when I posted earlier in the summer about which schools I should apply to, so thank you for that.

[Conscia Fati]

26 pages is too long. I promise you they won't read beyond 20, and that's already pushing it.

[videro]

I've been passing around a 15 page writing sample, and one professor even suggested it was a little long.

Look at it this way--even if your paper is too long, it will merely encourage professor to read the beginning and end, while skimming the meat of the essay. Therefore, as long as you're solid in the first and final paragraphs, it won't really matter how long your paper is.