If you write 300 words, you’ll end up with 1 and 1/3 pages double spaced.
Imagine this scenario. You work for a company that makes vacuum cleaners. Your boss wants you to create a user’s manual that contains 300 words. You’ll need to design the manual, leaving room for the instructions that have already been written. Here’s the question: How many pages does the user’s manual need to be?
To know how many pages you’ll need, first it may be helpful to think about how many pages 300 words equates to in standard formatting. As a handy standard, we recommend using Arial font or Times New Roman in a 12-point font size. That’s an easy-to-read option. Most readers prefer something classic. You could always test your limits with a more exotic font, such as Calibri or Verdana; however, think carefully before selecting anything too hard to read. You want your reader to pay attention to the content of your manual, not your formatting.
Since you’ve been given text with a known word count, you know you’ll need to leave room for 300 words. Using the chart below, you can see that the same number of words may result in a different page count, depending on the line spacing you select. A 300-word count block of text would result in 2/3 of a page with single spacing and 1 and 1/3 pages with double spacing. Once you’ve completed the design for the user’s manual, you know you’ll need to leave room for that volume of copy.
Of course, you can imagine that the content of your text may influence the outcome. Let’s say you use lots of big words in your user’s manual, such as scientific terms. That 300-word document could end up being quite a bit longer. Also, you may decide to create the user’s manual as a fold-up brochure. Because a brochure isn’t printed on 8.5 x 11-inch paper with 1-inch margins, you might end up with a very different page count. For that reason, we can’t give a definitive answer for how many pages you’ll need to use to accommodate 300 words.
Here’s the good news: Most word processors, like Microsoft Word and Google Docs, contain a word counter that allows you to determine the word count and character count of a document. Also, it never hurts to ask for clarification. If your boss wants the user’s manual to be a certain number of pages, be sure to double check to see whether you can adjust or edit the amount of words. As a good rule of thumb, use this chart to approximate the number of pages you’ll get for a particular amount of words.
If you’d like to know how to convert a speech from pages to minutes, check out this article.
