Help? Clarification of what this means?

[Psych_Law]

For a specific program, this is the information provided about the length of the statement of purpose:

Use a plain–text editor such as Microsoft WordPad to write and SAVE your essay(s). it must be no longer than 120 eighty-character lines of text (including spaces and blank lines).

So no more than 120 lines when writing it on Microsoft WordPad? Maybe? 

I emailed the department but the clarification wasn't helpful.

 

Edited November 12, 2015 by Becks_Psych

[fuzzylogician]

This seems pretty straightforward. No more than 120 eighty-character lines => your essay has to be less than 120*80=9,600 characters long, including spaces, punctuation, and everything else. Text editors like WordPad or TextWrangler (on a mac) can be set to wrap text at 80 characters a line, and then you can easily count how many lines of text you have. There are also online tools that can do this for you, if you google for them.

For reference, the average word length in English is just over 5 letters, so 9,600 characters would give you roughly 1,900 words, assuming no line breaks between paragraphs, and every line of text utilized to the max. This estimate would obviously vary depending on your writing style and word choices, etc., and I do think empty lines between paragraphs would be good, so you'll probably actually be left with less space than the absolute max -- let's say maybe 1,500 words or thereabouts. That's a pretty generous limit, so you probably shouldn't have too much trouble meeting it. 

[Psych_Law]

Thanks, I wanted to ensure that if I'm counting the lines of text in WordPad that this would be the right way to go. 

 

 

[fuzzylogician]

Assuming that your text wraps at 80 characters and not some other setting, that sounds correct. 

[Psych_Law]

Great, thanks for your help!!