Choosing Register for a Scholarship Application
Year 12 EAL students are drafting a 400-word personal statement for a community scholarship. The prompt asks applicants to 'describe a challenge you have faced and what you learned.' Tomas has drafted an opening: 'So basically my family moved here when I was 14 and honestly it was pretty rough at first, like I couldn't even order food properly, but yeah, I got through it.' He has also included a paragraph describing an argument with his brother in detail, including direct quotes of what his brother shouted, and a closing line: 'That's why you should definitely give me the scholarship.' His teacher has flagged register, relevance, and audience as the three issues to fix.
1. Diagnose the register problems in Tomas's opening and closing, and rewrite the opening in an appropriate register without losing his voice.
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Diagnosis of the opening: 'So basically', 'honestly', 'pretty rough', 'like', and 'but yeah' are conversational markers suited to speech, not to a formal application read by a selection panel. They signal informality rather than reflection, and 'like' as a filler obscures meaning. The content - migration at 14, language difficulty, persistence - is genuinely strong; the problem is packaging.
Diagnosis of the closing: 'you should definitely give me the scholarship' addresses the panel as 'you' and issues a demand. It reads as presumptuous and shifts the statement from self-description to persuasion of the reader, which the genre does not invite.
Rewritten opening (keeping his voice):
'My family moved to Australia when I was fourteen. At first, everyday tasks - ordering food, asking for directions - were genuinely difficult, and I often relied on others to speak for me. Learning to manage those situations on my own taught me more about persistence than any single success has.'
This keeps the honest, first-person tone and the specific detail (ordering food) while removing fillers and adopting a reflective register. A matching closing would state what he would contribute, not what the panel owes him.
2. Tomas's paragraph about the argument with his brother includes direct quotes of shouting. Should it stay? Advise him, referring to relevance and audience.
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Advice: cut or heavily compress it.
Relevance: the prompt asks for a challenge and what was learned. An argument with a sibling is a challenge, but unless Tomas can show that it arose from the migration or language situation and that he drew a transferable lesson, it reads as unrelated family friction. Direct quotes of shouting draw attention to the conflict rather than the learning, so the paragraph works against the prompt.
Audience: the panel are strangers assessing suitability for a scholarship. Quoted shouting is memorable for the wrong reason - it can suggest poor judgement about what to disclose, and it invites the reader to judge the brother rather than Tomas. Personal statements can be candid, but candour should serve the argument.
What to do instead: either (a) replace the paragraph with a second, shorter example of the same lesson - for example, a moment at school when he chose to speak up rather than stay silent - or (b) keep one sentence of the argument, without quotes, only if it directly illustrates the lesson, e.g. 'A disagreement at home showed me that frustration often comes from being misunderstood, not from bad intentions.' Test every paragraph against the question: does this show a challenge and a lesson?