Don’t use novelty envelopes or paper.
I’ve already covered the type of paper and envelopes you should use for your application, so if you’ve read this far, you can consider this a review. Just so we’re clear, though: you should save the Hello Kitty envelopes and sparkly pink paper – or the NASCAR stationery with “In Loving Memory of #3” envelopes — for personal correspondence.
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Don’t trash-talk the committee.
Back when we were switching our scholarship over from postal mail to e-mail, I made a joke on one of our websites about the U.S. Postal Service. I know, I know – you’re thinking, “That’s impossible! How could you possibly find something negative to say about the U.S. Postal Service?” I don’t remember exactly what it was that I said, but I know it wasn’t cruel or spiteful – it went something like, “there’s no reason to line the pockets of the USPS anymore, because we’re now accepting submissions only via email.” If you’ve read this far, you already know that I have little love in my heart for the USPS, so I think I did pretty well by restricting my comments to just that.
I mean, really, it could’ve been a lot worse. I didn’t mention their propensity to lose and destroy mail and never lift a finger to take responsibility or offer compensation for it. I didn’t mention that they hike stamp prices more often that the rest of us hike up our pants. I didn’t mention that you can stand in line at a U.S. Post Office longer than some kids stand in line to get a PlayStation 3, and I didn’t mention that the customer service skills make the Department of Motor Vehicles look like the Ritz-Carlton. And last but not least, I didn’t mention that every couple of years, one unlucky post office becomes a shooting gallery after a nutso package-sorter brings an assault rifle to work and decides to play a real-life version of Metal Gear Solid with anyone who comes into his field of vision.
A week or so later, we got a nasty email from a high school senior who insisted that she was certain she was qualified to win our scholarship – but refused to enter due to our “alarming and insensitive” comments about the post office.
Her letter left me with several observations: 1) Who loves the United States Postal Service so much that they would both write a letter of outrage about such an innocuous comment, and refuse to enter our scholarship contest in protest of that comment? Maybe both her parents were mail carriers. 2) If you thought that was alarming and insensitive, then you’d better not read what I just wrote in “Confessions of a Scholarship Judge,” because that might just give you a heart attack; 3) Good, don’t apply. That’s one more essay I don’t have to read before I go home and play with my children; 4) I actually feel a little bit sorry for her. If she really was “alarmed” by the post office crack, then she is in for a very rough go in this crazy, unpredictable world.
The moral of the story is this (yes, there’s actually a lesson here, not just an excuse for me to rant): Don’t waste your time lecturing the committee. Trust me, they’ll get plenty of good applicants with or without yours. If you don’t enter, no one will care or even notice. Except maybe your parents, who will have to dig into their savings to pay your college the money that you could’ve won with the scholarship.
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Don’t plagiarize other people’s work.
The Internet has made it easier than ever to pass off the work of others as your own, but if you’re bold enough to do so, beware of the double-edged sword: the Web also makes it easier than ever to catch you in the act. A stolen essay can be uncovered often and easily by Googling any sentence or phrase that sounds like it may have been lifted. An exact-phrase search on Google will often uncover the original source, which will, of course, expose any plagiarism immediately. And if we’ve got a good gut feeling that a paper has been plagiarized, then we won’t just Google a phrase or two; we’ll Google 15 or 20. A crafty plagiarist knows this strategy and will take measures to neutralize it by changing the wording of certain sentences. But they won’t go to the trouble of changing them all, and therein lies the likelihood they’ll get caught. After all, cheaters cheat to get out of doing the work that the rest of us do. If you were willing to go to the trouble of altering every sentence of an essay, you probably aren’t nearly as lazy as most cheaters!
Honestly, I doubt this is a problem for anyone reading this. If you’re here reading this because you want to learn how to earn more scholarship money, you’re not the type of loser who plagiarizes.
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Don’t use email smiley faces or any other sort of text-messaging language.
“OMG I want this schol soooooooobad! J/K, its all good!”
Now, I’m no curmudgeon. I understand that language, both written and spoken, is constantly changing and that it’s young people of every generation who drive a lot of that change. However, most of you realize that the style of communication you use for email, IM and text-messaging shouldn’t be the same style you use to communicate with scholarship judges in your application. The language and writing style you use don’t have to be stodgy or ultraconservative, but remember – this isn’t an email to your best friend, either.
Remember also, from a more practical standpoint, scholarship judges are often quite a bit older than you are, and therefore aren’t familiar with shorthand phrases like OMG or J/K and the 300 other ones that younger people use. Even if that style of writing were appropriate for a scholarship essay (and I repeat, it’s not!), the judges probably wouldn’t understand what the heck you were saying anyway.
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If your scholarship application is being sent via email, send it from a neutral or professional-sounding email address.
This happens dozens of times a day, so pay close attention here. A committee may love your essay, but you’d be surprised how their impression of you may change once they realize it was sent from demonicsoulslayer420@yahoo.com or gettinmydrinkon@hotmail.com or sexndrugs4ever@gmail.com. If it’s not obvious to you that sending email from addresses such as those is not exactly putting your best foot forward, then you should immediately go fill your sink with water and ice cubes, plunge your head into the icy cold and then WAKE UP!
Should it really matter what your email address is if your essay is great? Nope. Does it? Yes. File this one under “life isn’t fair.” Remember Rule #3 — the committee pays attention to every little detail. Yahoo!, Hotmail and Google all provide free email addresses – if you don’t have a firstname-lastname email address (as in, jennasmith@yahoo.com or roberto.martinez@gmail.com), then go get one from one of those services, and just use it for scholarships and other professional correspondence.
I would even take this a step further. The email addresses I used as examples above all contain some reference to drugs, drinking, sex, etc. — taboo topics, especially if you’re a high school student. However, I also recommend against sending email from innocent yet still non-professional sounding email addresses: cheerleaderchick@yahoo.com, thebaddest1@yahoo.com, whozyodaddy@gmail.com, gooeylouie@hotmail.com, etc. Basically, any email address that isn’t just your name and/or initials, I wouldn’t use. It’s too easy to just go pick up a free email account and put the issue to rest, and to be sure you’re putting your Best Foot Forward.
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Don’t email your essay as an attachment.
We now do a lot of our scholarships via email, and despite our warnings, students still do this occasionally. Here’s the problem: if a scholarship program is accepting submissions via email, that means the email address you’re supposed to send to is probably sitting on a web page somewhere for you to look at. If it’s on a public web page, that means spammers will probably end up taking the address and sending thousands of spam messages to it, and it’ll eventually get thousands of viruses sent to it as well. If that’s the case, the only safe thing for the scholarship provider to do is simply delete all attachments – all of them. And if you attached your essay as an attachment, because it’s impossible to tell what’s a virus and what’s not. Then your essay is gone.
If you absolutely must send your essay as an attachment (I don’t know why that would ever be so, but just in case), email the committee first and let them know your email with essay attached is coming in a separate email that you’ll send in five minutes or so. That way, they’ll know when it arrives that it isn’t a virus.
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Have two or more people read your essay before you send it in.
They don’t have to be smarter than you, or better spellers than you, or anything like that. But you should never send in an essay that hasn’t had at least two or three sets of eyes other than your own look over it. They will help you catch errors and other imperfections like the ones we’ll talk about below. Here’s a point that should shock you: about 85-90 percent of scholarship essays we receive come in with errors of some kind: spelling, usage, grammar or punctuation. Put another way: if you can send in an error-free essay, you rocket yourself into the top 10% right from the start. Hand yours over to a couple of friends and have them help you out.
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Language has rules. Abide by them.
We don’t mean to sound elitist here, but the rules of the English language have already been invented; you can’t just make them up as you go along. I could use any of 100 examples here, but one of the most recent examples to cross our desks is this one: “Another importance in my life is my schoolwork.” You can’t use “importance” like that; the writer should’ve said “Another important thing” instead. That one should’ve been eradicated by an English teacher way before this essay got to us. It’s OK if you don’t know all the rules of grammar and usage yourself, but it’s your responsibility to run your essay by someone who does before you send it in.
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Learn the difference between “their” and “there,” “its” and “it’s,” “effect” and “affect.”
Remember how we said that you’d be ahead of 90% of applicants if you just turned in an error-free paper? Well, if you learn these three, you can probably bump it up to 95%. These three distinctions are a) very basic and easy to learn, and b) seemingly screwed up by almost everyone, almost all the time. Lucky for you, I’ve come through for you with a mini-guide to these phrases, and if you use this guide you’ll never screw them up again:
there is the place across from here. If you can’t point in the direction of “there,” then what you really mean is this word…
their, which describes something that belongs to them.
It’s is a short way of saying “it is”. If you aren’t trying to say “it is,” then what you really mean is this word…
its, which refers to anything that belongs to it.
And 99% of the time, affect is a verb and effect is a noun. “Her speeches really affect me,” but “her words really had an effect on me.”
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Use proper punctuation.
Going into detail about all the rules of punctuation would take forever, and frankly, writing a punctuation book would bore me straight into the grave. To be honest, the rules of punctuation are far less well-known that those of spelling and grammar. But if you run your essay by a few people, including an English teacher, you shouldn’t have to worry about anything too egregious catching the eye of the committee.
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