Leslie H. Nicoll, PhD, MBA, RN, FAAN
Writer’s Camp Director
A manuscript needs to be the right length for a selected journal—always.
When you write a manuscript for a journal, it is important to pay attention to the length. “Too long” is a common reason for a quick “desk reject”; if you are lucky, you might have the option to revise and make it shorter. But for busy editors with lots of submissions, this might be a “one and done” situation. It is a mistake you can avoid.
In a study with my colleagues,1 we found that in a sample of 245 nursing journals, 83% specified manuscript length, either in words (64%) or pages (36%). If you happen to select one of the 7 (17%) of journals that do not indicate how long your manuscript should be, don’t assume that the sky is the limit. I have learned that editors pay attention to length, even when they keep it a secret.
An Illustrative Story
In a writing retreat several years ago, I had a participant who selected a journal without a specified word length. I advised her to go through the Manuscript Success process and she completed all the steps, including the Manuscript Math Outline (MMO).2,3 The first version of the manuscript she submitted was 25 pages long—it was a qualitative study, so there were many quotes which added to the length. It was selected for peer review and came back with a “revise and resubmit” decision. The very first comment? “This manuscript is too long.”
We were both puzzled. If there is no guideline, how can a manuscript be too long? This was my first experience with editors and their secret length requirements, and it was a learning experience.
My participant revised her paper, pared it down, and sent it back in. There was a lot of back-and-forth on this manuscript (if I recall correctly, I think she revised it four times). When it was finally accepted, the acceptance letter made it conditional: the final version had to be under 3000 words. We looked at the word count—3260. For a journal with no word limit, this was very precise! We got to work on this final edit and I have to say, it was painful. We were taking out tiny little words like “the” and “of.” In the final version, there were 2986 words and the paper was ultimately published. For anyone who would like to read it, the reference is at the end of this article: Burkhard, 2013.4
A Current Example
Just this week, I had a similar situation. A colleague submitted a manuscript that was close to 10,000 words and no surprise—immediate desk reject. Her rationale for doing this? “They didn’t specify a word length.”
I decided to test my MMO process to see if I could ascertain the editor’s secret word/page number. I went to the journal website and made a random selection of 8 open-access articles published in 2025. For each article, I opened the PDF and counted the number of paragraphs, excluding the abstract. I had two outliers: one article had 47 paragraphs and another had 11, but the rest ranged from 29 to 39 with a mean of 33 and a median of 34. I counted the number of words in a few sample paragraphs; the number ranged from 118 to 170 with a mean of 147. Using manuscript math, with a mean of 147 words and 33 paragraphs, the average manuscript would be approximately 4800 words. My colleague’s manuscript, at 10K words and 60 paragraphs, was double the expected length for the journal. Looking at it that way, the quick rejection was not a surprise.
An Avoidable Mistake
As I have said before,3 a major reason that editors reject manuscripts is because they are not a good fit for their journal and fit includes length. Journal due diligence5 is designed to help you become intimately familiar with a journal to make sure you make an informed decision about where you will submit your manuscript. Part of the journal due diligence process is determining the correct manuscript length and you do that in a couple of ways: by reviewing the Information for Authors and through your Template Article Analysis and MMO.2,3,6 If the Information for Authors does not specify the length in words or pages, then you need to do more analysis to give yourself an appropriate guideline to work with. Do not think you can write as much as you want—it will only get you in trouble as my two colleagues found out in the prior examples.
To establish a guideline, do what I did:
- Go to the journal website and select a recent issue of the journal.
- Identify a sample of articles. You can choose articles randomly, like I did, or select articles one-by-one from the Table of Contents.
- You want to ensure is that you are choosing the right type of articles—the peer-reviewed, primary content of the journal.
- Don’t select the editorial, departments or columns, or brief reports—you want articles that are representative of what you are planning to write.
- Make sure you are looking at a “regular” issue of the journal, not a supplement or special issue, as they may include articles that are not typical for the journal.
- Open the first article on your list, skip the front matter (abstract, author information) and count the paragraphs. Also note the number of pages in the article.
- If you want to be really detailed, you can count the number of words or sentences in a couple of paragraphs.
- When you have a representative sample, calculate the average number of words and paragraphs. Compare this to your Template Article Analysis—the number of paragraphs should be roughly the same. If there is a major deviation, figure out why.
- In this case, your template article should be from your selected journal which should be the same as you are using for this exercise. You want to compare apples to apples.
And there you have it! You have figured out the “secret editor information” regarding manuscript length. Use this information to your advantage to avoid writing a manuscript that is too long for your selected journal.
Conclusion
Most journals make it easy and tell you how long a manuscript should be. If you happen upon one that does not specify length, don’t make the mistake of assuming you can write whatever you want—you can’t. Do a little extra analysis to develop a guideline based on articles already published in the journal. This will serve you well to prepare a manuscript that is in line with what the editor is expecting, which is an important key to success.
References
1. Oermann MH, Nicoll LH, Chinn PL, Conklin JL, McCarty M, Amarasekara S. Quality of Author Guidelines in Nursing Journals. Journal of Nursing Scholarship. 2018;50(3):333-340. doi:10.1111/jnu.12383
2. Nicoll LH. Template Article Analysis: How To Do It. The Writer’s Camp Journal. 2025; 1(2):7. doi:10.5281/zenodo.16507159
3. Nicoll LH. The Manuscript Math Outline. The Writer’s Camp Journal. 2025; 1(2):9. doi:10.5281/zenodo.16644557
4. Burkhard A. A Different Life: Caring for an Adolescent or Young Adult with Severe Cerebral Palsy. Journal of Pediatric Nursing. 2013;28(4):357-363. doi:10.1016/j.pedn.2013.01.001
5. Nicoll LH. Manuscript Success: Journal Due Diligence. The Writer’s Camp Journal. 2025;1(1):10. doi:10.5281/zenodo.15570045
6. Nicoll L. Manuscript Success: Using a Template Article: Why it Works. The Writer’s Camp Journal. 2025;1(2):2. doi:10.5281/zenodo.15792795
Author: Leslie H. Nicoll
Reviewed and Edited by: Melissa Anne Dubuois
Copyright © 2025 Writer’s Camp and Leslie H. Nicoll. CC-BY-ND 4.0
Citation: Nicoll LH. A commentary on manuscript length. The Writer’s Camp Journal. 2025; 1(2):15 doi:10.5281/zenodo.16952048
Thanks Leslie! Manuscript math is such a helpful concept that I had not encountered until I read your book and this addition is another helpful way to use it.