Use a standard font size.
Although the appearance of each font will differ, usually a standard size is 11 or 12 point (by way of comparison, this book is written in 12-point Trebuchet MS, and it’s written for easy reading, not essay-style formatting). If you go any bigger than 12, your essay starts looking like a billboard. The only reason I can surmise that anyone would be using a font size bigger than 12 is that they are attempting to make a short essay look longer than it is (perhaps trying to meet the requirement of, say, a five-page essay when you’ve only got three and a half pages). If this is the case, please trust me on this: you’re fooling no one. If you’ve reached the point in your life where you’re acting as a scholarship judge, that means you’ve probably written hundreds, if not thousands, of essays in your life – essays with those same page limits, requirements, etc.
We’ve been there before, monkeying with the font size (“Bump it up to 14 and see how that looks!”), the line spacing (“You think they’ll notice if I use 2.5 spacing instead of just double spacing?”), the leading, the kerning, putting a header and footer on each page, pushing the horizontal margins in, pushing the vertical margins down, etc. You name it, we’ve probably done it. Not only that, but when your essay comes up for review after dozens of others who didn’t fool around with formatting tricks, then yours will stand out like the proverbial aching digit.
On the other hand, if you go smaller than 10, things get difficult to read. Remember that, in most cases, these same committee members who know all the spacing tricks are quite a bit older than you, and for a lot of them, their eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Ever watch your grandpa struggle to read the TV Guide? (Do people still buy the TV Guide? I’m not sure. If they do, they’re sure to be grandparents.) And if they can’t read your essay, they can never find out how great and worthy of scholarship money you actually are. That’s why it’s important to keep the font at a reasonable size.
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If possible, use a laser printer instead of an inkjet printer.
Ink smudges easily; toner doesn’t. It’s that simple. And the more committee members there are putting their grubby little fingers all over it, the more likely an inkjet-printed essay is to get smudged up and ugly. If you print your essay with a laser printer, it’s got a better shot of staying in pristine condition until the judging is done.
Laser printers aren’t nearly as hard to come by as they used to be. In fact, prices are coming down so low that inkjet printers will probably be extinct in five years. In the last six months, I’ve seen laser printers priced as low as $79. If you can swing that, pick one up for your home use, and you can use it for everything you write.
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Use high-quality paper.
GiveMeScholarships.com is replete with advantages big and small, but this is one of the best, dollar for dollar. After years of administering scholarship programs, I’d say that 95% of all paper essays we’ve received have been printed on “copy paper” – basically, the cheapest and lowest-grade paper you can stick in a printer. For most uses of a printer, this makes sense. There’s no reason to spend a penny more for things like school assignments, letters, forms, grocery lists, and whatever else you use your printer for.
However, the scholarship essay is a special occasion. Think about this for a second: if you were going to an in-person interview with a scholarship committee and they were going to decide on the spot whether to give you any money, how would you dress? Would you put on whatever T-shirt and shorts happened to be at the top of your dresser drawer? Or would you actually clean yourself up a little bit and put on some of your nicest clothes?
You’d clean up, of course. There’s money at stake here, and you’re an intelligent GMS reader who remembers Rule #1: Put your best foot forward. Hence, you’ll try to look your best.
But why is it when this whole process revolves around making words on paper look nice, 95% of students make no effort whatsoever to “dress up” their applications? After all, a nice package of high-quality paper is a heck of a lot cheaper than a set of nice dress clothes. You can get 50 sheets of high-quality paper at OfficeMax or Wal-Mart for around $3, and it makes a HUGE difference in the appearance of your essay, in several ways:
a) It makes your essay different from almost everyone else’s essay, and that alone counts for putting a great deal of separation between your essays and all the others in The Stack (that’s shorthand for the huge stacks of essays that pile up, sometimes very high, on judges’ desks during application periods. You’ll read more about The Stack soon).
b) High-quality paper doesn’t dog-ear, wrinkle or crease nearly as easily as copy paper or other standard printer paper. That’s what makes it high-quality.
c) It shows that you cared enough about your essay to go above and beyond – that you took the task seriously enough to add some extra effort.
Those things may seem small and obvious, but they’re not. If so, everyone would do them. But by and large, people tend to do what’s most convenient and easiest, and in this case, that’s just printing their essay on whatever kind of paper happens to be already sitting in the printer. Bad news for them, good news for you: it opens up a quick, easy way to give yourself an advantage over them.
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Use boldface and underlining sparingly.
Bolding and underlining are good for the occasional emphasis of certain words, but using them too often is the hallmark of a bad essay. The problem is that boldfacing and italicizing are simply methods of making some text stand out among the other text; if you use them more than a couple of times, then the reader gets used to seeing the special formatting and doesn’t think it’s anything special anymore. Effect lost!
The content of your essay needs to speak powerfully for itself – you have to resist the urge to boldface or italicize every word you want to emphasize. Writing isn’t speaking; you can’t control exactly how the reader hears what you’re saying. You’ve got to let your writing speak for itself, and if you have to rely on bolded, underlined and italicized words to provide the emphasis every time you want to make a point, then you’ve probably written a weak essay.
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Don’t scribble something on your typed essay in pen.
We’re surprised at how often some students go to the trouble of laser-printing their essays on high-grade paper and mind every last detail so that the essay’s appearance is near-perfect — but then, at the last minute, ruin it all by scrawling something in pen at the top of the page (usually their name, address, email or something similar). We suspect that, after spending so much time writing and perfecting their essay, these students are exhausted and simply want to “be done with it.”
That’s understandable, but it’s better to think about it this way: You didn’t spend all that time putting your Best Foot Forward just to run out of steam at the last minute and get lazy. You’ve come this far – just spend five more minutes and type in the information you forgot, and then reprint it.
Does it really matter to judges that your address is written in pen at the top? Well, it’s one of those very small psychological things that are almost unconscious, but yes, I believe it does. It’s not so much that it makes your essay look bad; rather, it simply makes the other applicants (those who turned in essays without pen scrawl) look better, and believe me, you don’t want that. The competition is already tough enough — the last thing you need to be doing is helping them out.
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Use black ink only.
Scholarship judges know that even the most affordable ink-jet printers can print in every color of the rainbow. But you don’t have to prove it to them by printing your essay in magenta or aqua. Use black, and only black. Remember: Creativity belongs in the writing of your essay, not its appearance.
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If your essay is longer than one page, put your contact information – and page numbers – on each page.
I’m going to guess that you’ve never thought of this either, because judging by the applications I’ve received in the past, fewer than 1 out of about 500 applicants do this. But you should. Here’s why:
When thousands of multi-page essays stack up, it’s inevitable that some are going to get torn apart. Lots of them. What ensues is a tornado of loose paper and disconnected essays. “Somebody’s page 3 is over here, someone else’s page 2 is over here, here’s someone’s first page… do these essays go together? I can’t tell. Does this page look like it matches this one?”
Dirty Little Secret: When this happens, sometimes judges just say “screw it,” and throw all the loose papers away. Remember Rule #1: Competitors are everywhere, and thousands of people apply for every scholarship. Hundreds are excellent students with excellent essays who deserve money for college. Tossing a few loose papers away won’t mean a good candidate won’t be chosen. However, it does mean that you won’t get chosen if those loose papers happen to be yours.
If you’ve got your name and a page number on each page, there will be no confusion about who the essay belongs to and which pages belong together. This is very easy to do with the Header and Footer function of Microsoft Word or similar programs. You just open a header or footer (no need to do both), and insert your name and click a button to automatically insert the page number on each page (it varies depending on which program you’re using).
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