Taking into account word lengths when writing humanities articles
Aim for what you want to say, and then see where you are. Every paper I've ever written was too long in the beginning because I wrote down what I thought was necessary to say. Then you cut to what the limit is, by omitting unnecessary words (the English language has many options for that), critically rethinking whether a sentence is necessary, etc. But that should be the second step: Start by putting down what the paper should be, absent word limits.