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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Be grammatical.
Just like punctuation, this isn’t the place to list all of the rules of grammar. It’d fill a book five times longer than this one. But the more people to whom you show your essay before you send it – and ideally that list includes one English teacher or other grammar wizard – the less likely you’ll be to send in an essay with grammatical errors.
Suffice it to say that using good grammar is important, and because so few people use grammar correctly, you’ll set your essay apart immediately by doing so.
Use action words.
I’m borrowing here from our forthcoming sister site, givemearesume.com, because the advice applies to the scholarship application process just as much as the job-hunting process. When describing the things you’ve done, use as many strong action verbs as you can. Don’t say that you just “went” somewhere, “signed up” for something or “participated” in an event. Say you spearheaded, collaborated, created, organized, mobilized, delegated, supervised, led, etc. Strong action verbs speak loudly! They conjure up images of busy men and women doing a lot of work, and that’s what you want the committee to think of when they think about you: a hard worker, buzzing with activity and leading the people around him/her to create. Use those action verbs, and those are the images you’ll create in the minds of the judges.
Get to the point!
Your introduction should be completed in a paragraph, maybe two. Not four or five. Long-form, scene-setting openings are for novels, not scholarship essays. Get to the point quickly and begin to develop the “meat” of your essay right away.
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Bad News: 98% of applications get tossed in the trash. Yours is probably one of them.
More Bad News: Financial aid is drying up, even at big colleges. Without scholarships, you're probably screwed.
Good News: I'm a real judge who writes scholarship checks every month & I just released a guide to winning scholarship money. (Your teachers and counselors have it all wrong.)
