Expert Tips for Scholarship Essay Perfection as well as How to Write a Winning Scholarship Essay, this article highlighted some key area needed when writing financial aid applications, merit-based scholarships, and much more.
Write to Win: Expert Tips for Scholarship Essay Perfection
Apart from the main college application, there is often a secondary application for scholarships as well. In these applications, you have to provide some general information and write a supporting essay. In this essay, you explain why you need the scholarship or why you deserve the scholarship. This supporting essay is known as a scholarship essay.
One thing you need to understand about this is that this essay is much different from other types of essays. Upon reading this article, you will understand why that is. That’s because we are going to be sharing some effective techniques for writing a winning scholarship essay.
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How to Write a Winning Scholarship Essay?
An online source states that only 7% of students are likely to receive a scholarship. So, what can you do to become a part of this seven percent?
Here, we have discussed everything from the prerequisites to the post-processing of scholarship essay writing. Following these techniques will help your chances of scholarship acceptance.
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Understanding the Purpose of the Scholarship Essay
As we have hinted before, scholarship essays can be of different types. Even though most of them have a similar framework, there are still some minor distinctions among them. For example, in a financial aid application, you would have to focus more on the finding aspect.
However, in the excellence-based scholarship demand, you have to focus more on your skills and expertise. So, it is crucial to understand the purpose of your application or essay before you write it. This will ready your mind for what to write.
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Crafting an Engaging Introduction
A scholarship essay roughly contains around 500 words. Now, you would obviously want the application reviewers to read all 500 of those words. This can be possible if your introductory lines hook them.
In other words, your introduction passage needs to impress the reader. You can do this in multiple ways. For example, you can express your unique ambitions, your drive to pursue dreams, or you could even quote a famous personality. Based on the type of scholarship, you need to choose what would be more fitting.
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Building the Body of the Essay
This is the most impactful part of your scholarship essay that determines whether or not you will get the scholarship. Here, you have to explain two general things:
- Why you chose the institution/scholarship
- Why should the institution choose you
You have to support both of these claims with concrete reasons. In doing so, you can share personal experiences, your academic achievements, community service, etc. Any of your relevant achievements should be a part of your essay.
Another thing to take care of is the originality of your essay. Everything you share should be unique only to you. But if you don’t know how to be sure of that, you can perform an originality test on your essay. You can do this with a plagiarism checker.
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Concluding With Impact
After the introduction and body of the essay, you have to focus on the conclusion. This part of the essay is where you have to make a final impression. There are various approaches that you can take on in this regard.
For example, you can provide a summary of your journey until now. Or you can discuss what your goals are going to be once you get that scholarship. However, make sure that instead of sounding desperate, your essay sounds ambitious.
Overall Writing Tips
In the previous section, we talked about the step-by-step guide on how to write various sections. Now, we will discuss some general writing tips that apply to writing all types of sections.
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Utilize Readable Sentences
There is a high chance that the scholarship you are applying to has a large number of applicants. This implies that there will be a large number of essays. In this situation, the reviewer can’t spend a long time on a single essay.
So, to facilitate the reader, you have to use readable sentences in your essay. Using complex words or difficult sentence structures is not a good idea. But if you have already done this, then you will need to make some alterations.
One solution is to paraphrase the difficult-to-understand sentences. You can either do this by rewriting them, or you can paraphrase online. In both cases, the readability of the sentences will be improved.
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Avoid Common Pitfalls
While you are writing a scholarship essay, it is very easy to get distracted and start writing about irrelevant stuff. You need to steer clear of this at all costs. If you think that something is even remotely irrelevant, you should skip it.
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Use Proper Formatting
Formatting of the essay is another thing that matters in a scholarship essay. It makes youressay look more professional. Simple steps like using short paragraphs and indenting all of them can be followed for this.
Wrapping Up
By now, you should know that, unlike normal essays, a scholarship essay needs to have a compelling tone. Moreover, these essays are shorter than traditional essays. Because of these minor differences, the methods of writing both these essays are different. We have discussed all the techniques relevant to this in the article above. You can follow them to write scholarship essays that get positive responses easily.