Scholarship Essay Contest Writing

An important tool for getting scholarships
Writing college scholarship and grant essays is one of the basic tools for getting many applications. Although there are scholarships that don’t require essays (available on the bottom right), many scholarships do require an essay. First off, make sure you use proper grammar, sentence structure and punctuation, if these are week areas for you seek help from someone who is proficient in these areas. A school counselor, family member or friend might be able to assist you in this area.

Brand Yourself in Your Writing
Everyone can write a generic essay, but not everyone can apply their wits and creativity to writing a scholarship winning essay. This is an opportunity to shine and often one of the only tools available for selecting a scholarship winner. You need to use this opportunity to make yourself a candidate and to stand out from the crowd.

This does not mean that you should be zany or create some unbelievable self inflated image of yourself. This is your chance to show off with well conceived and constructed thoughts and clear, concise writing.

Originality
You need to stand out from possibly thousands of other essays.

You want to write an essay in your voice and have an interesting topic, or theme that runs through it. Don’t try to be too formal, your essay will appear stiff and get lost in the crowd.
Some scholarship competitions give you a theme or topic; this is a double edged sword. It gives you direction but requires even more creativity as it requires even more effort to stand out from the stack of other scholarship essays.

Proofing, Editing and Rewriting Your Essay
Writing good essays takes time and focus. Complete several drafts of your essay, improving its concepts, ideas and grammar each revision. Each revision will create a stronger essay and make your time and effort truly worthwhile. This is your chance to improve your message and clarity as well as clean up sentence structure and garbled viewpoints. These errors will be detrimental, so work out the kinks!

Short Cuts Don’t Work:
Plagiarism and Paid Services

Don’t get the idea that it is acceptable to borrow someone else’s work. This is plagiarism and is the quickest way to get rejected for scholarships and grants. If you need to use writing from somewhere else make sure that it is properly cited.
In the internet age you can not get a way with plagiarism, it is extremely easy for scholarship organizations and groups administering college grants to find out. There are a variety of sites and paid services that they use to quickly find out if material is original. Online samples and sources have most likely been used before and will be quickly caught.

Many paid services offer so called original essays for a small fee. These are absolutely worthless; they will be neither original nor well written. They are a waste of both your time and an opportunity to improve your future.