7. Use high-quality paper. You can get 50 sheets of high-quality paper at OfficeMax or Wal-Mart for around $3, and it makes a big difference in the appearance of your essay. It doesn’t dog-ear, wrinkle or crease nearly as easily as copy paper or other standard printer paper.
12. If your essay has a page limit, insert your name and contact information in the header or footer to save space. Many scholarships limit your essay to a page or two, and quite often writers will take up five (sometimes double-spaced) lines with their name, address, email address, and other information. When space is at a premium, use the header or footer function of Microsoft Word, Works, Word Perfect or whatever program you use. This function lets you squeeze your name up into the margin area, where your essay wouldn’t be appearing anyway. That way, you can squeeze in an extra paragraph if you need to.
23. Go easy on the slang, yo. Every generation uses a great deal of slang, but it’s usually not the same slang the previous generation used. And it’s most likely that the committee evaluating your essay isn’t from your generation. One recent applicant mused about his football career and “leaping for a pick and taking it straight to the house.” If you watch Sportscenter, you know he meant he intercepted a pass and returned it for a touchdown. But guess how many of our committee members watch Sportscenter? Not many.
27. Don't knock your peers. For a lot of our applicants, when they’re trying to show the committee how hard-working they are, they end up disparaging their peers while making the point. We get a lot of statements like: "While the other kids in my class were out (partying, horsing around, having fun)…I was (studying, working two jobs, caring for my younger siblings).” Most writers don’t realize this, but drawing these comparisons makes you sound a little uppity. It’s better to just mention what you do, and drop the “While my classmates were out…” part. We already know what some of the other kids are doing in their off-time: We see them street racing down the road, loitering at restaurants and preening at the mall. But we also know that those are mostly normal things that teenagers do, and implying that you’re superior to them makes you look a little silly. Don’t talk about others; talk about you.
33. Show some industry. Talk about what you've actually done – not just the groups you’ve joined. Sure, you were in your church’s youth group. And you can put “Four years in my church youth group” in your application if you want. But you’ll set yourself apart and make your essay sound much better if you talk about what you did over that time. Let’s say you spend four years in your church youth group serving meals to the homeless one day a week in a soup kitchen. Maybe you served an average of 150 people on each of those days in the soup kitchen (it’s OK to estimate). There are 208 weeks in four years, and that means you served 31,200 meals to homeless people during high school. Now that’s impressive. But if you don’t present the information that way, then we’ll never be impressed. We know you’re industrious but you have to tell us what you’ve done. That makes the difference
between a boring essay and one that makes the committee’s eyes pop open.
49. Don't draw attention to your negatives; instead, don't refer to them at all. We’ve all got weaknesses, and a scholarship essay is usually not the time to bring them up. If you’re failing your math class, that’s a detail you probably want to just leave out, rather than go on about at length and then explain how you plan to fix it.
53. If you mention a hardship, be sure it's really a hardship. If your parents were killed when you were a baby and you were raised in an orphanage, that’s a unique hardship. If you were raised in suburbia and had to share your 2,600 square-foot house with three raucous brothers, that’s not. If you had to get a job at age 8 to help your family pay rent, that’s a hardship. If you had to get a job at 16 to pay for your first car, that’s not a hardship.
61. Avoid emphasizing commodity accomplishments. We call things like honor roll and, for college students, the dean’s list, “commodity accomplishments.” It's not that you shouldn't be proud of them – I was on them both when I was a student – but they’re commodities. Nearly everyone who applies for our scholarships is on the honor roll or the dean’s list. Does that mean don’t mention them? No – it simply means don’t spend a lot of time talking about them, because it’s unlikely to impress a scholarship committee.
78. Write to be easily understood. Another way of saying this would be, “use big words only when necessary.” Don’t use a three-syllable word when a one-syllable word will do. Don’t say “utilize” – say “use.” Don’t say, as one recent applicant did, that you want to “ascertain an occupation” – say you want to get a job. Making things more complex than they need to be isn’t helpful to you or the committee.
89. Don't use acronyms without explaining them first. You may know what FBLA or JA or AYBWA is, but that doesn’t mean your committee members do. Spell out the words of the acronym the first time you refer to the organization, and then you can use the acronym from then on.
