How to Write a Winning Scholarship Essay
You have your letters of recommendation, scholarship resume, and have carefully filled out the scholarship application. All you need to do now is write the winning essay. What can you write about that will get the attention of the scholarship judges? Where do you start? What is the secret to writing an essay that will help you win the scholarship money?
First, you need to understand that the point of having you write the essay is so that the judges can get to know YOU. They already know your name, SAT/ACT score, GPA, date of birth, etc… When you write the essay you get a chance to share with the judges your opinions, thoughts, and feelings about the subject they ask you to write about. They will be instantly bored if you start your essay with something like, “My name is _______ and I go to _______ high school”. This information is found on your application and is not very interesting!
To get the attention of the judges (who possibly have thousands of essays to read), start your essay with a compelling statement. Grab their attention right away and give them the desire to want to read your essay right through until the end, rather than skim it or toss it in the trash after the first few paragraphs. How do you do this? Think about the subject of the essay, decide what your opinion is, and then tie it into something that you’ve actually lived and firmly believe in. For example, to answer the question, “How will this scholarship money help you?” you can start with “I love to sleep in, but for the last year I have dragged myself out of bed each Saturday morning so I can get down to my local children’s hospital to read stories to the sick children who are patients there…” Then you can go on to explain how much you want to be a doctor and the scholarship money would help you pay for college and bring you one step closer to this dream.
By writing your essay, you are able to make yourself real to the judges. You know that you are more than a name on a piece of paper and now is the time to prove it. Help the judges use their imaginations to see you in their minds by writing with lots of real life situations, heartfelt emotions, and descriptive words. Use tools like the thesaurus to make your writing come alive and be remembered by the judges. Tell the truth and never lie in your essays. Write your own essay and do not let your parent write the essay for you. Remember, scholarship judges have read a TON of essays and can easily spot the ones that are not student-written, stretch the truth, and want to win so badly that they will say anything to make themselves look better than the other applicants.
Scholarship judges want to find YOU in your scholarship essay. By writing from your heart, telling the truth, and drawing them in from the very first sentence, your chances of winning the scholarship improve dramatically. There are other ways to make all your scholarship applications stand out right from the moment the judges pull your applications out of the envelopes. Visit http://www.how2winscholarships.com for free scholarship tips and to learn the method that will put your application above the rest and win free money for college.