How Long Is 5000 Words In A College Essay

May 22, 2020

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When in high school, most of your essays were just a few pages discussing a particular topic. However, in college, students often get confused as to how many pages are adequate to appease the instructor. The truth is that most college papers have a specified word count.

Why should a paper be 5000 words long?

Papers with this large amount of words are often useful in writing term papers. A term paper is not your ordinary essay. Writing this type of paper takes a lot of time and intellectual capital. The student will often need to provide sources of information through citations and quotations. Also, the instructor might demand that the students review some literature as part of the paper.

The basic approach to writing an essay of 5000 words

If you want your lecturer to marvel at your work, you will need to take note of a few things when writing the term paper. Here are some of them:

Formatting style matters

Depending on your field of specialization, students might need to format their papers accordingly. Formatting means writing an essay using a specific and consistent style. Combining formatting styles is a bad idea and is an ‘unprofessional’ approach to writing a term paper. Here are some of the standard formatting styles for term paper writing:

APA
MLA
Chicago and Turabian

Research and brainstorm

The word limit gives the student a picture of the amount of brainstorming and information that should go into the paper. An excellent technique involves brainstorming and conducting a lot of research on the topic to get a better understanding of the subject matter. After that, you will proceed to writing your paper.

Split into paragraphs

All your ideas should be written in paragraphs, not exceeding 150 words in order to maintain clarity.

Proofread and edit

Grammatical errors and lousy punctuation can hurt your paper badly. Take some time to check if the grammar is in order before submitting the final term paper.

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