Cover letter word and character counter

Words are counted as in a word processor: “don’t”, “well-known” or “2026” each count as one word. Characters include letters, punctuation, spaces and line breaks; the “no spaces” figure removes spaces and line breaks.

Reading time is based on 238 words per minute, the average silent reading speed of adults for non-fiction according to Marc Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies in English. A recruiter skimming a letter often reads faster: this is an estimate for careful reading.

The “cover letter” (250 to 400 words, about one page) and “application email” (80 to 200 words) benchmarks are our team’s guidelines, not rules. The Parcoursup limit (1,500 characters for the French university application letter, unless a programme asks for more) and the LinkedIn limit (2,600 characters for the “About” section) are published by those platforms: see sources.

Sentences over 25 words are flagged: this is our readability benchmark, as a longer sentence almost always reads better split in two. Repetitions only cover words of 4 letters or more, excluding function words (“with”, “your”, “that”…), used at least 3 times.