Guides
Writing length guides
From how characters are counted to bytes, manuscript paper, application essays and reading time — the rules behind the numbers.
- 01
How characters are counted: spaces, line breaks and emoji
Why the same text gets a different character count on different sites. How spaces, line breaks, emoji and combining characters are counted.
- 02
How bytes are counted: UTF-8, EUC-KR and CP949
Why a Korean character is sometimes 2 bytes and sometimes 3. How to count bytes in each character encoding, and what to watch for in text messages and databases.
- 03
Korean manuscript paper (wongoji): counting sheets and writing rules
How to count 200- and 400-square manuscript-paper sheets, and the rules for paragraph indentation, punctuation, numbers and Latin letters.
- 04
Application essay length: how to fill a character limit
How much of a Korean self-introduction essay's character limit should you fill? From checking the space basis to allocating length per question and trimming when you go over.
- 05
Estimating reading and speaking time: how many minutes is my text?
How to estimate from character or word counts how long a text takes to read or to deliver as a talk, with default speeds based on research and broadcasting conventions.
- 06
How word counts work in different languages
English and Korean are counted by spaces; Japanese and Chinese have no spaces. Why word counts differ from tool to tool.
- 07
Polishing your writing with sentence length and word frequency
Concrete ways to make your writing easier to read using average sentence length, the longest sentence and your most frequent words.