Write a rough draft of your essay. This will allow you freedom of expression and thought without worry of spelling mistakes or punctuation mistakes. The rough draft is to focus on placing your thoughts on paper.
Answer the question that was asked of you in the scholarship question. Most scholarships want to know the answer to a specific question, or they include a specific statement, such as "Tell us why you feel this scholarship would benefit you at our university." Keep this main topic in mind as you write your essay and stick to the topic.
State your goals within the essay. Highlight how you feel the scholarship will help you attain these goals. Show the scholarship board that you have a plan in place to use the scholarship to achieve success.
Highlight your positive points, such as high grade point averages or test scores, volunteer projects that you have done for your community or church, extracurricular activities and foreign languages that you speak, and list any awards that you have won. If you have volunteered at a particular place that you feel helped you decide your career path, that would be an effective angle to take in your essay.
Describe a particular lesson that you learned from a teacher, a missions trip, a school trip or another situation that you feel might illustrate your leadership abilities or describe your personality traits more clearly to the scholarship review board. If you have a disability, you can bring this up in your essay to give examples of what you have learned due to the disability or what challenges you have had to overcome.
Type the essay in double-spaced pages and place numbers on the pages, beginning on the second page, in the upper right hand corner. Place your last name in the upper left hand corner of the page, beginning on the second page. On the first page, begin 5 inches down from the top and then type a title. Skip 2 inches from the title and type your name. The scholarship informational packet may give instructions on how the essay is to be submitted. If it does not, go with the information just described. You should add a cover page giving your name, address and telephone number.
Edit your essay and do a spelling check. Do not rely on the computer spell-check program to do the spelling check for you. Spelling checks on computers cannot check for human errors on words such as "hear" when "here" was what was needed. Edit and double-check the spelling yourself. Allow someone else to look over it for you, also to possibly catch errors that your eye may miss.
Check for punctuation errors, capitalization errors and grammatical errors.
Place the essay away for a few days to let it rest. Don't look at it. This will give your eyes time to forget what you have been working on, in order to allow you to better catch mistakes when you pick it up a few days later.
Read over the essay again a few days later, aloud. Have red and blue pens available. Delete unnecessary words with the red pen. Use the blue pen for general editing. The colors will help you type the changes into the computer more efficiently.
Check the essay for redundancy. If there is a point, topic or a specific word that is repeated often, delete it or change it.
Type the essay with the new changes. Print it out and read over it with the changes.
Edit the essay several more times until you have given it the final polish. Sometimes during the editing process, the revisions may cause the essay to lose some of it's conversational or personal tone and can come across as too mechanical to the reader. Seek a balance during your revisions and be careful not to polish the shine right off of a winning essay.