A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing a Scholarship Essay
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To apply for college, you have to prepare financial aid applications, university applications, admissions essays and scholarship essays. Maybe you’re surprised that you need an essay for your application, but it’s a common task for many applicants, so you must be ready for it.
We know that you may need help, so we prepared a simple guide for you. Just follow these ten steps, and you’ll write your essay easily!
- Grab Your Readers
Your introduction is one of the most important parts of the essay. Depending on your introduction, your readers will be either interested, willing to read further, or bored, so that you’ll lose them from the very beginning. Make your first paragraph unique, and your paper will stand out. - Re-Use Your Scholarship Essays
If you enter several competitions, don’t waste your time writing every essay from scratch. Just adjust an essay that you’ve written before for your new needs. Topics for such essays are often similar, so you can use it. - Surprise Them
Some questions may be banal, for example, “Who influenced you most?” You may want to start writing about your mother or father, but don’t hurry up and find some answer that won’t be so obvious. Just imagine how many students would write the same thing.
What if Batman has had the biggest influence on you? Or maybe it was Martin Luther King? Be original. - Follow Your Instructions
If your essay almost meets all requirements that you’ve been given, it means that you failed your task. You shouldn’t write less than you’ve been told, however, don’t try to exceed expectations, especially when it comes to the number of words. Don’t forget that stakes are high, so make sure that everything is perfect. - Focus on Your Topic
Your readers have read hundreds of essays, so you must be specific to keep their attention. Don’t write about something that is unnecessary and not related to your topic. - Make Your Point
Your scholarship essay must be focused on one clear statement — your main message. We suggest considering your thesis statement as a short and clear answer to the question of your essay. In turn, the whole essay must be a detailed answer based on the thesis statement. - Check Your Spelling
Just believe us, you don’t want to give scholarship judges another reason to cross off one of the hundreds of students whose essays they need to check. If you don’t want to be rejected, make sure everything about your essay is good. And don’t forget that nobody knows that you made some typo accidentally. Your readers will rather think that you wrote some mistake (for example, “reeders”) intentionally. - Check Your Grammar and Punctuation
We could have include grammar and punctuation in the previous paragraph, but this issue deserves to be considered in detail. No matter how unique and smart your ideas are if they are wrapped in terrible grammar. The same applies to punctuation as well — make sure you didn’t miss any mistake when writing.
We suggest reading your paper a few times. You can also ask somebody else to take a glance at it and express an opinion. - Care About the Quality of Content
When you put a lot of effort into your paper, your readers can feel it. It’s good if you take this task seriously, and you may regret if you don’t. The key to success is to write about things that really interest you, not something you think you “must” write about.
- Write a Good Conclusion
A redundant conclusion is bad for the entire essay. If you don’t think your essay is worth writing a good conclusion, why your readers should consider it worth reading? Don’t just rephrase your thesis statement. Instead, use the opportunity that this section of an essay gives you, and tell your readers why you think your essay is important. Consider your topic in a more global context and leave your readers with something to think about.