Audience: Address your essay to typical readers of the New York Times, which you can assume is a general, though well-educated, audience. Your essay will take the form of a Letter-to-the-Editor of the New York Times. Assume that your audience has not read the article you’re responding to... Typical length of a chapter - Improve Your Writing -… However, the typical length is between 2,000-5,000 words.For another, the chapter lengths switched when the narrator switched, going from chapters with a few hundred words to chapter with several thousand words.But 1,200 seems like a sweet spot for me as a general anchor point.