personal statement word count

hi! i’m just finishing writing my personal statement and i’ve hit exactly 4000 words. should i refine it further or is this ok?

Reply 1

artful_lounger

Universities Forum Helper

4000 words?! That's a very longer personal statement!

Do you mean 4000 characters? That's a big difference :redface:

Reply 2

hannah24555

Original post

by artful_lounger

4000 words?! That's a very longer personal statement!
Do you mean 4000 characters? That's a big difference :redface:

hah yeah characters whoops😭😭

Reply 3

sere3n4

Original post

by hannah24555

hi! i’m just finishing writing my personal statement and i’ve hit exactly 4000 words. should i refine it further or is this ok?

heyy! just double check that when you copy and paste into UCAS it’s still 4k characters as Google docs doesn’t count paragraph breaks as a character! also confirm with others that it’s not too wordy/waffly about the same point if you’re looking to save characters

Reply 4

LancashireRep4

Official Rep

Original post

by hannah24555

hi! i’m just finishing writing my personal statement and i’ve hit exactly 4000 words. should i refine it further or is this ok?

Hi @hannah24555

It is perfectly fine for your personal statement to be 4000 characters. However there are some things you may want to be aware of.

If you are looking at the wordcount on a document, rather than on UCAS, consider there may be a couple characters added based on formatting when you copy it over. I recommend having a buffer of of about 20 characters.

If you wish to refine it, I recommend taking out any unnecessary words and make sure you are not "waffling".

There is no concern unless you are over 4000 words. 😊

I hope this helps, please feel free to ask me any questions,
-Sophia (University of Central Lancashire)