Tips on Writing A 1200-word College Essay

May 22, 2020

College students get scared once they see essays of over a thousand words. Something about this number makes it feel like a threshold to sleepless nights. Most students end up looking up terms like “how many pages is 1200 words” before they start writing their paper. The truth is that 1200 words are the same, no matter how you decide to interpret it.

However, if you want to know what really goes into this type of essay, there are some things to consider. Without going into the contents of the paper, most college papers follow a specific structure commonly known as formatting styles. With a deeper understanding of the two most common styles (APA and MLA), you can determine the page limit on your essay.

APA (American Psychological Association)

This writing style is common for social sciences and essays within this discipline. If you choose to format your paper using this style, here are the specific parameters.

📝12-point font size
📏1-inch margins
📄Double spacing
🖍️Abstract page
📑Works Cited Page
📌The Title page is separate
🧾Running Headers on all pages
🖊️In-text citation with the name of the author and year of publication
📄275 words per page

The overall word count for a 1200-word college essay (excluding the title, abstract page and, works cited page) using the APA formatting style is 4.5 pages double spaced.

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MLA (Modern Language Association)

This writing style is standard for research papers and humanities. These are the features of a student paper in MLA style.

📝12-point font size
📏1-inch margins
📄Double spacing
📌The Title is part of the first page
📑References page
🖊️In-text citation with the name of the author and specific page
🧾No running headers
✏️300 words per page

The total word count for a 1200-word paper according to the MLA formatting style is precisely 4 pages(excluding the References page).

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