WRITING
FELLOWSHIP ESSAYS
General
Guidelines
Writing fellowship essays
is like anything else: doing it well requires work. Fellowships
essays, like all writing, need to be clear, specific, engaging,
organized, and purposeful. Committees read fellowship essays as
indications of clear and organized thinking and effective communication.
Rules of good writing, such as using transitions between paragraphs
and sentences, effectively ordering your points, and thinking about
diction play a key role in persuading a fellowship committee that
they need to call you in for an interview and/or offer you the fellowship.
Here
are some tips:
• Open
strong : The opening sentence grabs your reader and makes
him or her pay attention. It sends the message: READ ME; DO
NOT SKIM; DO NOT FALL ASLEEP; THIS LOOKS INTERESTING. That
said, avoid platitudes. Do not begin essays with sentences such
as “From the beginning of time human beings have been curious” or
“In America education is the key to success.” These comments cue
your reader to expect a boilerplate piece of prose.
• Be specific
and concrete. Avoid abstractions and generalizations and
use detail whenever possible. Rather than saying you are excited
by policy issues, discuss a particular policy issue that interests
you. Instead of saying that you are motivated, show an instance
that demonstrates your motivation.
• Never
be satisfied with the first version of a sentence. Work
your prose. Reject a vague word for a more precise one, substitute
the exact strong verb for the weak one you thought of first, and
choose one precise adjective in favor of a list of two or three.
You should be able to explain why that word is the right
one for this sentence. Vary your sentence structure from
the standard subject-verb-object order; move the dependent clause
to the beginning of the sentence rather than the end or vice-versa.
You should be able to look at each of your sentences and explain
why it begins and ends where it does. Essays which have been worked
over, far from showing that labor, read fluently.
• Keep
the Audience and Purpose in Mind. Most of the fellowships
we work on in the DOCFO have an audience of well-educated generalists,
so you do not want to make your project so field-specific that it
will be difficult for a person from a different discipline to understand
and care about.
• Proofread!
Even if you feel that you have your essay memorized, make sure you
read it over carefully before turning in the final copy. Try different
proofreading exercises such as reading it from the bottom up or
reading it aloud. You do not want to be the Rhodes candidate with
a typo in the first paragraph of her essay.
Further
Resources
DOCFO conducts workshops
on Writing Project Proposals and Writing
Personal Essays at least once a semester. Check our
Calendar for the next workshop.
We have binders in our
office with examples of winning essays for most of the fellowships
for which we advise. Stop by to look at these examples.
Our office provides editorial
support for writing fellowship essays. Contact
Us to arrange an appointment with our graduate Fellowship writing
tutor, undergraduate Writing Fellow, or Dean
Linda Dunleavy.
top of page
|
