What "Page Count" Means

You might want to read “Why the Page Count?” before taking a look at this post.

Beware! Math logic below.

As both an instructor and student, I frequently hear some variation of “What constitutes three (or five or ten or however many) pages?” The answer has always been the same: Fill the last page, and the works cited page does not count.

On the one hand, clarification is important. After all, if assigned a five page essay and you have a dozen words on the fourth page and you have your works cited page, then do you have a five page essay? Well, I haven't met an English teacher who would accept that for a five page assignment. Why the rigid assignment requirements? 

One example. You are assigned a four page essay and you write and write and write until you have three pages and about a quarter of a page, so we can reasonably say your essay is three and a quarter pages long. At best this would round up to three and a half. At worst, it'll round down to three. Well, your essay is a half a page short. Half a page doesn't seem like much, right?

A half of a page for a four page assignment will come to 1/8 of the overall length: 12.5%. That's a lot. If we’re talking grades, that’s the difference between an A and a B-. If you were taking a math test with 40 questions and left five of them unanswered, you won't get full credit for them – so why should you on an essay? 

This still leaves an irksome question: what does fill mean? Just how much is that? Some instructors may specify a word count or range; others may want so many lines on the last page, or even inches. I try to shy away from word counts and other solid numbers, but I do tell my students the last page should have enough text to fill well over half of the space. If an essay falls right at or just over half a page, I won't reject it, but it's not going to get full credit. After all, it’s a writing class with certain expectations and falling short on requirements means not meeting those expectations.

The safe thing I've seen students do is write just up to the edge of the last line of the last required page or just go over. When I see this, I think it's overkill and I expect there to be a couple of inflated sentences. There may even be an odd expository paragraph somewhere. The best course of action would be to have an essay of a reasonable length and sufficiently detail, but if it's between a vacuous paragraph or a couple wordy sentences, it at least shows an effort to meet the requirements.