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How long is short essay: Recommendations for students


A common task that many students get in college settings is to write some form of a short essay. Obviously, the task in question can be rather confusing. What is a short essay? How many pages or words should a person dedicate to some problem? Well, how long is short essay? In this short post, we want to clarify the issue once and for all by providing the readers with all the key relevant information.


How long is short essay: Length requirements


Our experience shows that short essays typically include from one to four pages of content. In more realistic word-centric terms, this extent amounts to essays that range from 250 words to 1000-1100 ones. Generally, the time requirements for the majority of such works are rather low. A writer who knows how to properly format an essay and prepare the key materials would typically take 30 minutes per 250 words (including proofreading) and 2 to 3 hours concerning the longest short essays with 1000-1100 words of content. Obviously, the difficulty of the instructions can change some of those parameters. Certain essays are very short but require weeks of preparation in terms of data collection. Still, the majority of the short essays are unlikely to take more than 3 hours even in the case of the least experienced students. Professionals of various kinds would go through such materials, as mentioned above, with an even greater speed and produce materials of tremendous quality.


How to structure a short essay


A big question that concerns many types of so-called short essays undoubtedly includes the structure. Obviously, it is difficult to include all the traditional elements, such as the review of the potential rebuttal for your position, if the overall space for the arguments is highly limited. In this respect, our recommendation is to concentrate on the following elements in the majority of the essays of this kind. The answer to the question ‘how long is short essay?’ is simple. It should be long enough to include the following elements:


  1. Introduction that offers the key information about your aims and goals. A thesis statement that follows the structure of a claim connected to a set of justifications/main arguments by a linking word such as ‘because’ (for instance, ‘War is wrong because it kills people and ravages economies’). If you need any help with these aspects, a good idea is to address the services of EssayHave, a top student help service.

  2. At least one main body paragraph (preferably three and beyond, however) that follows a clear use of the topic sentences that explain the key arguments, good presentation of arguments for some of your main statements (we recommend using the Introduce, Cite, Explain approach in this case, which is utilized in some of the most potent institutions across the U.S.), and a good conclusion that offers a clear explanation of your main statements;

  3. A conclusion that reiterates the main statements of your essay and, more importantly, offers an insight into the reasons why your reader should genuinely care about the key information provided in the material.


All in all, short essay writing is far from being difficult. How long is short essay? Enough to fully promote your position and explain it even to the least receptive audiences. The opportunity to write short essays is also a great chance to learn how to be very concise. In this way, you will have a way to acquire truly efficient writing skills with very limited resources.