Whatever you know about writing an academic essay, you will have to keep that information aside because it will not work with writing a scholarship essay. This is because college essays tend to be a lot more personal than any academic essay you have written before. With college and scholarship essays, you essentially have to give them a glimpse of your personality, what you are capable of and why you deserve that scholarship over anyone else. This tends to be a lot of information that has to be conveyed in an essay that is usually less than a 1000 words. But don’t fret, because we have you covered with some success tips that you can use to your advantage.
Read the prompt thoroughly
When it comes to college essays, they tend to give you a prompt around which your essay should be based. Students often make the mistake of not reading this prompt as properly as they should and then miss out on important details that should have been included in the essay. The right approach with the prompt is to read it a couple of times before you begin to brainstorm.
Get creative
With scholarship essays, you have a lot more freedom to be creative as compared to academic essays. Sit down and brainstorm all the ideas that you can incorporate in the essay using the prompt. Then narrow down two or three that you like the most.
Outlining the essay
Now hat you have some concrete ideas in your head, the next step is to jot them down roughly in the form of an outline. Here you should also include all the other information that you will be including in your essay, preferably in bullets because you don’t want to be too detailed in your outline. Think of everything that will add emotion, depth and even humour to your essay. Think of all the experiences that you have went through that led you to be in this very situation, and applying for a scholarship.
Begin writing
By this step you will have a pretty good idea of what your essay should look like, and you can begin writing it. When it comes to writing the essay, we usually advise our students to be as specific as they can instead of being too general. If you mention some skill set, make sure to back it up with an actual example in which you used it. If you mention your achievement, let the reader know about the work and effort that went into that. Many people can say list generic strengths, but they usually will not write down about the instances that they used these strengths in.
Editing
The last but most important step is the editing. Before you submit your essay in, you will want to do at least a couple days’ worth of proof reading, and even ask your friends and teachers to give it a read. With the advice you get, your essay may have a chance of being improved.
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