Guidance for the College Students | How to Write a Unique Scholarship Essay

Writing an essay for a scholarship is challenging because sometimes, the pressure of getting into a scholarship program gets to you, and you forget the basics. But that’s where this blog post will help you.

This post will guide you in writing a unique scholarship essay. However, apart from the tips, you will also find how to check plagiarism from your scholarship essay with the help of plagiarism checker software. So, you can make it unique before submitting it to the scholarship agency.

Thus, without wasting any time, let’s begin.

Tips to Write a Unique Scholarship Essay:

1.     Read and Understand the Essay Topic Properly:

The topic of a scholarship essay is not just a story. It’s more than that. So, before starting to write your scholarship essay, it is essential to understand the topic of your paper correctly.

This step is most crucial because when companies advertise scholarships, they have specific goals in mind. Therefore, it is vital to recognize and address those goals through your scholarship essay to make it perfect and unique.

For instance, when a scholarship committee wants you to write about how you would handle a challenging situation, they don’t want you to describe the scenery of you dealing with it. Instead, they want to test your leadership skills, understand how you handle conflict resolution, and check your personality through your essay. So, you can only understand the true purpose of a scholarship essay’s topic by analyzing it.

2.     Start Early and Overcome Procrastination:

Procrastination is a killer of productivity, and it is most common among writers. So, when it comes to writing, a practical approach to overcoming procrastination is to brain dump, which means getting ideas from your mind onto paper.

You should not worry about perfection in this phase because the first drafts are never perfect. Instead, the main goal of this phase is to brain dump and transfer random thoughts about your scholarship essay from your mind onto the paper.

3.     Start With a Strong Introduction:

A scholarship essay shows your thoughts, research, and opinion about a topic. So, you should avoid using quotations at the start of a scholarship essay. Instead, try a hook to catch your readers’ attention and keep it authentic.

A hook is a combination of two or three sentences that draws the attention of judges or readers. It can be a question or anecdote, but it should be related to your scholarship essay topic. So, whether you are writing a blog, essay, or any other piece of writing, it is essential to catch your readers’ attention. And the only way to grab your readers’ attention is to create a hook at the start of writing.

4.     Pick a Proper Essay Format:

The standard essay format consists of an introduction, body, and conclusion. So, let’s see the things necessary to include in each part of an introduction.

            Introduction:

As mentioned earlier, the introduction should contain a hook to catch judges’ attention. But it should not have famous sayings.

Body:

In the body, you should stay relevant to the goal of the scholarship essay. For instance, you can share your relevant experience and interest in it. Similarly, you can also include the relevant famous sayings in the body part. However, you should avoid including more than two quotations because the essay is about you.

            Conclusion:

The conclusion is the part that differentiates a scholarship essay from other forms of writing because here, you should not conclude your topic. Instead, highlight the hook you’ve already discussed in the introduction to create a comprehensive and unique scholarship essay.

5.     Paraphrase Where Necessary

Paraphrasing is an essential technique that all writers should be proficient in. It helps them articulate difficult concepts in an easier fashion. It is great for increasing the readability of content.

And there is more good news, you don’t have to be limited to manual paraphrasing but instead you can rely on a paraphrase generator to make your content unique automatically. Most online paraphraser are equipped with multiple modes that have different capabilities. Some of them increase readability while others make the content look different.

Paraphrasing is usually done during the editing phase, but it can also be done as you have written a particular section. Sometimes the writer realizes that what they wrote needs improvement and can paraphrase it on the spot.

6.     Share Your Experience, Interest, or Anything Related to You:

Your experience and interest are the only things that separate your scholarship essay from other participants and make it unique to the judges and reviewers. So, you can discuss your personal experience and give insight into your daily routine and time management skills in your scholarship essay.

But this doesn’t mean you should start including sad stories to get judges’ sympathy. Instead, you should demonstrate your strength through your struggle because scholarship essay reviewers admire perseverance and determination rather than grief and sorrow.

For example, you can include an incident that shows you do not give up easily. However, you should find a way to make your story stand out and get better reception. So, think outside the box and apply a unique approach to catch judges’ attention.

7.     Do Not Include Things From Your Transcript:

As mentioned earlier, the body of the scholarship essay should target its goal. So, you cannot include the details from your resume or transcript because everybody can find those details by looking at your documents. Instead, if you want to make your scholarship essay unique, craft a story.

8.     Write Different Scholarship Essays for Other Scholarship Programs:

One significant mistake most students make while applying for a scholarship program is they prepare one scholarship essay and submit it for every scholarship program. Doing this is not beneficial because every scholarship agency has different goals for its scholarship program. So, presenting the same scholarship essay for multiple scholarship programs is only a waste of your time.

9.     Proofread Before Finalizing:

Proofreading is as essential as a document’s research and actual writing phase. The same is the case with scholarship essays. So, you can either pay someone to give you an honest opinion about your scholarship essay or ask someone from your friend or family circle to proofread your essay. This way, you can get an honest opinion about your scholarship essay before the final submission.

How to Check the Originality of a Scholarship Essay?

You may have followed the tips to write a unique scholarship essay. But how can you verify whether your written content doesn’t contain any accidental plagiarism? A solution to this query is plagiarism checker tools.

A plagiarism detector won’t help you create original content, but it will inform you if your content contains any plagiarized portions. So, you can take help from such tools to check plagiarism in your content. Then, you can rewrite the plagiarized parts with a new strategy to avoid any chances of elimination from the scholarship program due to content duplication.

Last Updated on September 8, 2022 by Admin