Submission pages

Submitting

How your paper is submitted will have an overall affect on how it is viewed by your audience. Even if you read your prompts, satisfy the writing requirements, edit and revise, and double check your formatting, if you do not submit it correctly all your work is lost.

Some scholarship essay portions are copy and paste textboxes ready for you to add you work. Even though you can directly type into the boxes, it is recommended that you type your essay in a writing application such as Word, use the formatting and editing tools in application, and then copy it from the Word document into the textbox provided.

Others allow you to upload your submission directly to the scholarship application.

If it is a direct upload, it is crucial that your essay opens like you have written it. Everyone has different preferred settings, document programs, or operating systems. All of these can make your essay appear a mess no matter how hard you worked.

After you have written your essay, edited and revised, it is time to convert it to a PDF. PDFs are opened the same way no matter what operating system or preferred software is used. A PDF will preserve your work exactly as it is written and will open as a more legible document.

Once your essay is ready for submission, select “File” at the top of your Word file. Select “save as” and from the selection bar choose PDF.

Add the title of your essay and then save. This will save your essay as “Scholarship Essay. pdf. ” Below you can see the difference between a Word file open in Google docs and the same file saved as a PDF and opened the same way.

Saved as a docx- or Word document

Saved as a PDF. The clearer choice is the PDF. It only takes a second to convert and it could make the difference in being awarded or thrown out.