Majority of scholarships require applicants or candidates to write an essay, which is why it is very important that your essay impresses the scholarship judges. You must meet their specific criteria and there shouldn’t be any spelling and grammatical errors as well.

Also you should make sure that the quality of your essay is at par according to their requirements, which may seem very intimidating. Many students struggle with writing process to begin with, and writing a good quality, well crafted essay on another topic may seem like too much to hassle.

However, if you are sincere about obtaining scholarship money for a college, you should accept the fact and prepare yourself that you would have to write an essay or two for most of the scholarships you will apply for. Many essays have writing prompts that the applicant is required to answer in their essay, the chief goal and purpose of the scholarship judges is gain an understanding of you as a person, your beliefs and ideas should be reflected through your essay.

Starting the Essay

The starting of an essay is more often than not, the hardest part. How do you begin the essay? Here are a few guidelines you should keep in mind while starting your essay.

1. Understanding the purpose

First of all, you need to get an understanding of why you are writing this essay. What motive or reason could the judges have behind setting this question as a basis for your essay? Analyze the writing prompt. Figure out why you are writing what you’re writing. You can also write down the question of the essay and work out how many parts or aspects do this question has, and in what order you should structure your essay according to the prompt.

You should also consider the need of any research to be executed for writing it, or whether the question can be answered by your life’s experiences only. As goal of a scholarship essay essentially is, for the judges to learn about you, so you should bear in mind how can the judges learn about me through this essay.

2. Goals

Before starting the essay, you should identify your goals for the essay. The goals depend on and vary according to the essay question and whom are you writing it for? For example, one of your goals may be to show the judges through your writing that you have a healthy balance between your personal life and your academic life. Another goal may be to demonstrate that you were able to succeed despite many difficult obstacles you faced throughout your life. Yet another can be to demonstrate what lessons have you been able to deduce from your experiences in life.

The above goals are only examples, and your goals may be similar or different depending on the essay topic, obviously. The bottom line is to formulate a set of goals for your writing and allow your personal character to reflect through. You’ll also want to develop an overall theme for your essay that relates you to the subject you are writing about, whatever the topic might be, during the process of identifying the goals of the essay.

3. Write an outline
Some people just set out writing the essay, without an underlying plan in place. For any other essay this approach is okay, but you will find it helpful to devise a plan for writing a scholarship essay. It sure does add quality to it. Also it ensures that you include all the points you want to hit in the essay, not miss out on any one of them. And it also provides a guideline to structure your essay in a logical way.

Once you have determined all the above three elements, that is writing the goals, settling on a theme for your essay and creating a general outline, it’s time to write the first draft. Yes- please notice I said first draft. Because an essay is rarely, if ever, ready on a first attempt. After writing the first draft you need to go over it to see which areas could do with more improvement.

Revise

The key to crafting a well- written scholarship essay is, to show the judges rather than telling them. If there are examples in your essay where you are merely telling it, edit it by showing to the judges how it is important, and how is it relevant to your life and the essay in hand. Also, remember to keep the essay in present tense as much as possible. This might not work everywhere, but you should use it, where you can.

Another thing to keep in mind while doing the revision is to eliminate as many unnecessary words as possible. You should try to be as succinct and brief as possible. Which means saying whatever it is that you are saying in as few words as possible. You will find out that isn’t always possible, but if you see that a part of your essay can be revised using lesser words than you should go for it.

Next, double check the introduction and ensure that it is entrancing enough to catch the judges’ attention. This is important because if the first line of your essay isn’t interesting or is the same, usual, countlessly used in general and sluggish, they probably won’t read the rest of essay. In a way, your introduction is the most important part of the paper – it gives your readers an idea of what’s to come next.

Lastly, give essay a solid and sound conclusion. Don’t merely end it buy summarizing every point and end up making it a hopscotch, instead summarize only the main points and keep it short and sweet. Thereafter, keep it aside after revising it for a jiffy, so can come back to it with fresh eyes. This way you will find that your essay probably needs more work and also you will detect errors that you weren’t able to see earlier.

Once you think you have a well-drafted, acceptable and adequate essay, you can congratulate yourself. You’ve made it through a demanding part of the scholarship application! These points are important to consider while writing an essay, regardless of its topic or for whom is it being written. The crux of the matter is that you should let your unique views reflect through your essay prompt. And in doing so a tip would be to be yourself, don’t try to impress them by inserting fake experiences and ideas that you don’t really believe in, because you wont be able to justify it, and it will show.

Writing a scholarship essay may seem like a demanding task but with hard work and with the consideration of above points, you can create a well-written essay, inflict upon your judges that you are a unique individual.

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Category: Education
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