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Paper Two Scholarship Application Essay Points: 20 Word Count: 1,000 + 500 (see below) Due: Thursday, October 1, at the beginning of class The scenario is this: whoever it is who pays for your tuition has run into financial difficulties, and will not be able to continue funding your education. As we discussed in class, your tuition accounts for about half of the cost of your education, while the taxpayers of Illinois pay for the other half--but the catch is that you have to come up with your half before the taxpayers will pay theirs. So, you will need to find financial aid in order to keep going in school. Find a scholarship application that requires an essay. We will discuss in class how to go about looking for scholarships. The scholarship must be one you could actually apply for (not, for example, a scholarship for graduating high school students). For this assignment you will turn in the application and the essay required by the application. No matter how long the essay is supposed to be, however, your essay for this assignment will be 1,000 words long. Before you write the essay, spend a substantial amount of time researching the scholarship, the benefactors, the people who will read your essay, past winning essays, and so on. You will need to write a 500-word assessment of "What They Want to Hear," which you will turn in with the scholarship essay. For the purposes of this assignment, I am asking you to have absolutely no scruples; you will attempt to write what you think they want to hear, whether you actually believe it or not. Grading your work, I will first make sure you have made a substantial effort to figure out what kind of essay the evaluators will want to read (for this I will refer to the 500-word essay and your research materials); then I will assess whether you have produced in your essay what you believe will please the readers. I will also, of course, grade your work on the basis of our Grading Standards. We will go through many examples in class. Format: Both essays must be typed and printed, and double-spaced. Your name must be on every page. No title page is required. The paper must be stapled. You must turn in the scholarship application, the writing prompt from the application, and copies of all the supporting materials from your research into the scholarship. Grading: Papers must meet the assignment before I will grade them. While grading, I will follow the standards suggested by Eastern's English Department. The "Process" category will not apply to this assignment. A grade of "C" or lower in any single category will trigger that grade for the paper. |