How Long Is 300 Words?

There are instances where it is useful to know how long an amount of words is on a page when writing.

If you have a specific word count to reach for work, school, or university or if you want to measure out how many words a night you can write and not tire yourself out, then it is good to get a measure of how long that is, especially if you have deadlines.

However, it can be hard to judge or understand these measurements easily, especially the smaller ones.

So, with that in mind, we thought we’d answer the question of how long 300 words is – one of the smaller word counts around.

Is it easy to reach in a short amount of time? Or will you need to spread it over a few days?

Factors That Affect How Long A Word Count Is Perceived To Be

Before we answer this question, we need to go over a few factors that affect word count.

The first is that of font and font size. If your usual font size is small (11 or below) then 300 words will take up less space on a page, if it is larger it is going to take up much more space.

Likewise, if you use a large font, then that will take up a lot more space on the page than a smaller font.

The other thing to keep in mind is what presentation the text you are reading has.

If you are reading a fiction book or a novel, then 300 words takes up a page roughly, but if you are reading an internet article then it is going to take up as much space as the styling of the article allows. As such, presentation is key.

Other stylistic choices that can affect the length of 300 words are whether you use double spaces instead of single spaces between lines, whether your borders around the page are bigger or smaller, whether you change the alignment of your page, whether you use paragraph breaks, and so on.

The list goes on, and it all depends on your choices.

How Long Is 300 Words?

To give you an idea of how long 300 words is, we are going to give you two examples.

The first is a standard essay and the second is an internet article.

With the first example, if you use Times New Roman font and font size 12 with the standard margins given to you by Microsoft Word, then 300 words will cover roughly half of a page.

With double-spacing, this becomes almost a full page, maybe a short paragraph under.

The second example of an internet article is actually this article itself.

From the title of this article to the end of the sentence: ‘As such, presentation is key’ is exactly 300 words.

Although the presentation and style of the article will change with uploading and website design, it will give you a rough idea of how long 300 words is when you are looking through internet articles.

As you can see, even though 300 words may seem like a lot, it isn’t actually that long and most essays you write in school are probably longer, maybe between 1000 and 2000 words.

How Long Does 300 Words Take To Write?

This is a slightly trickier question to answer, as it depends upon the skill of the person writing those 300 words and how concrete in their mind is the idea of the thing they have to write about.

If you are a writer and write most hours of the day, it will probably take you a very short amount of time to write 300 words, but if you don’t write at all, it will probably take you some time.

Let’s take the metric of words per minute written. If you write slowly, between 5 and 10 words per minute, then it will take you 30 to 60 minutes to write 300 words.

If you’re writing at an average pace, between 35 and 45 words per minute, then it will take you 6.6 minutes to 8.5 minutes to write 300 words.

And, if you write at a fast pace, between 60 and 70 words per minute, then it will take you 4.2 minutes to 5 minutes to write 300 words.

While this is not a certain science, it really does show the variables that affect your writing speed and how much you should push yourself to write per day.

How Long Does 300 Words Take To Read?

Not long at all, reading 300 words is far quicker than writing 300 words, due to the fact that it involves one action rather than two happening at one time.

Generally, it will take a fast reader 30 seconds to read 300 words and a slow reader a minute to read 300 words.

This is because less thought is put into the action of reading.

It requires you to look and read solely, while writers will have to think about what they are putting onto a page.

Putting something on to a page requires the writer to constantly read and write, while also thinking about whether the sentence they are writing makes sense, has the correct punctuation, and generally is correct.

If any of these metrics are not appropriate to you, then don’t worry.

These are rough estimates for the majority of people, but they are by no means specific.

Writing and reading are very personal, and everyone does them at their own pace, whether that be slower than others or a lot faster than other people.

Conclusion

300 words appears differently long depending on the circumstances, but in general it will cover between a third to a half of a page if you use Times New Roman and font size 12.

If you want to aim for a word count a night for working or your own projects, then 300 words is a good way to go, as it doesn’t take too long, but it builds a slow and steady amount of work.