“How long should this be?” is usually the wrong question, but it is the one you have at 11pm with a draft in front of you. Here are the lengths that hard limits impose, the lengths convention expects, and a way to think about it when nobody has told you.
Hard limits: get these wrong and something breaks
These are enforced by a platform. Exceed them and your text is truncated, rejected, or silently rewritten.
| Where | Limit | What happens if you exceed it |
|---|---|---|
| SMS, single message | 160 characters | Splits into multiple billed messages (153 chars each once split) |
| SMS with any emoji or accents | 70 characters | Encoding switches to UCS-2 and the limit drops sharply |
| Google Play short description | 80 characters | Rejected at submission |
| Google Play full description | 4,000 characters | Rejected at submission |
| Apple App Store subtitle | 30 characters | Rejected at submission |
| YouTube video title | 100 characters | Rejected |
Soft limits: nothing breaks, but you lose the end of your sentence
These are display truncations. Your text is stored in full; the reader just never sees the tail.
| Where | Aim for | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Page title tag | 50–60 characters | Search results truncate on pixel width, not character count — around 580px on desktop |
| Meta description | 140–155 characters | Same; anything longer is cut with an ellipsis |
| Email subject line | 30–45 characters | Mobile mail apps show roughly this much |
| Email preheader | 40–90 characters | Shown next to the subject in most inboxes |
| LinkedIn post before “see more” | ~140 characters | The rest is behind a tap |
The pixel-width point matters more than it sounds. A title made of narrow letters fits more characters than one full of capitals and Ws. If a title is near the limit, check it in an actual search preview rather than trusting the count alone.
Convention: what readers and markers expect
Nothing enforces these. Missing them badly still reads as wrong.
- Blog post, useful: 800–1,500 words. Long enough to answer the question properly, short enough to be read.
- Blog post, reference or guide: 1,500–3,000 words, but only if every section earns its place. Padding to hit a number is visible to readers and, these days, to search engines.
- Cover letter: 250–400 words. One page. Nobody has ever complained that a cover letter was too short.
- CV: one page for under ten years’ experience, two pages beyond that.
- University essay: whatever the brief says, within 10 per cent. Read the rules on whether footnotes and references count — they usually do not, and that is often 15 per cent of the total.
- Conference talk: about 130 words per minute when spoken well. A 20-minute talk is roughly 2,600 words, and almost everyone writes 3,500 and then rushes.
- Wedding or best man’s speech: 700–1,000 words. Five to seven minutes. Genuinely.
Reading time, and why the number varies
Reading-time estimates divide word count by a words-per-minute figure. The figure is where all the disagreement lives.
Research on adult reading speed in English puts silent reading of non-fiction at roughly 240 words per minute on average, with a wide spread. Reading aloud is much slower — around 150 wpm for comfortable, clear delivery. Skimming for gist can exceed 400.
So a 1,200-word article is about five minutes silently, eight minutes aloud, and three minutes skimmed. If you are writing something to be spoken, use the aloud figure and time yourself once; the difference between 130 and 150 wpm is two minutes on a twenty-minute talk, which is the difference between finishing and being played off.
Word Counter gives words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time as you type. Character Counter counts down against title, meta description and SMS limits. Reading Time Calculator lets you set the speaking rate for a talk.
What “long enough” actually means
Every guideline above is a description of what usually works, not a target. The real test is simpler and harder: can you cut a paragraph without losing anything the reader needed?
If yes, the piece was too long, whatever the count said. If you keep finding questions the piece raises and does not answer, it was too short. Word count is a diagnostic — useful for spotting that you have drifted, useless as a goal in itself.
Write it, cut it, then check the number. Not the other way round.