Digital files are measured in terms of “bytes” (usually consisting of eight bits) and a standard single-spaced page of text will contain about 4000 bytes. A good rule of thumb for estimating how many words or pages are contained in 4000 bytes is one byte per word. Therefore, if your essay contains an average of 5-letter words, you have a limit of around 800 words total. Conversely, if your essay contains an average of 8 letters each, the word limit would be around 500 words. Because the average word length in English is about 8 letters, you can therefore estimate about 500 words (about two double-spaced pages) for your essay. Finally, if you want to be absolutely certain you’re within the 4000-byte limit, there are some useful resources online that can help you measure your byte usage (there are 839 bytes in this response).
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