APIASF Scholarship; ADVICE!

Hello there,

I was hoping to get different views on how to approach writing scholarship essays. For example, I was writing the essay for the APIASF Scholarship. The prompt I chose was:

In 500 words or less, please describe your short-term and long-term personal and education/career goals and what has helped to shape your goals. What specific steps will you take to reach your personal/education/career goals?

I began writing the essay and I had written approximately 480 words before I noticed that I only addressed certain parts of the prompt. I talked extensively about my short-term and long-term education/career goals and what has helped to shape these goals. However I completely overlooked the parts about short-term and long-term personal goals and the specific steps I will take to reach these goals. I decided to review my essay again to remove any extraneous parts. In my opinion, it was not a bad essay; however. it more suited for a 1000 word essay than 500 word one.

I spent a quarter of my essay on writing an introduction that would be better suited in an English essay rather than a scholarship essay that only addressed my short-term education/career goal without touching on my personal goals. I spent another quarter of my essay writing about the motivation behind my short-term goals. As you can guess, the remaining half went to long-term education/career goal and what shaped it.

I know the first advice I should take would be to actually read the prompt and not be an idiot, but what I wrote for the scholarship essay is consistent with my standard writing style. I like to use a lot of descriptions when I write and I tend to go for flowery and lengthy introductions. However this approach utterly fails when writing low word limit essays, as in most scholarship essays.

How would you approach an essay like this? I know that word caps for paragraphs are highly not suggested, but in this instance, would you aim for a 50~75 word introduction? Afterwards define the short-term personal and education/career goals in the same paragraph? I have an example below. It's really bad, but it's the middle of the night and this essay is not letting me get any sleep. I just wrote down the first thing that came to my head. I've been working on this essay for five hours now and I will likely have to scrap the entire thing and start over.

[ In the immediate future, I am determined to continue putting out my best work and not Senioritis bog me down. While urge to slack off is escalating, I'm planning to carry my work ethics and momentum over to college with me this Fall. Hopefully if I can continue my success in college and graduate with degree steadfast in my grasp. ]

Thank you to everyone who read this,
Brian

Brian,

First, I think that is a fairly well written introduction. You articulated what is to come in the rest of the essay, and when you only have 500 words to write an essay, I think this is totally acceptable; also, I think your introduction could be anywhere from 50-100--even 125--words.

Scholarship essays are a lot different than English class essays, but it's important to realize that it doesn't mean you can't use your English essay STYLE in one. Always write in the style you are most comfortable with, as it will allow you to articulate most clearly and concisely.

After the intro, what I recommend is to start writing (using the advice below) while keeping in mind the word limit, THEN you can decide the most logical order and organization of paragraphs, etc. Just try to be free in your thoughts, then organize.

When approaching an essay like this you must always remember this word: CONCENTRATION; and what I mean by that is you have to concentrate every idea in order to make it fit and have enough room to add and make the essay flow. For example, in one scholarship essay, I began to write about a speech that I was inspired by, but halfway through realized that I had spent WAY too much time discussing the actual speech and not its implications. Those are the kinds of things you have to look out for when writing an essay like this, because the word limit can threaten to pull you down.

Best of luck, and I hope this helped!