The Scholarship Essay Deadline
Maria is applying for a scholarship. The essay prompt asks her to describe a challenge she overcame in 500 words or fewer. Her first draft is 680 words. She has three body paragraphs: one about moving to a new country (210 words), one about learning English (180 words), and one about joining the debate club (150 words). Her introduction is 90 words and her conclusion is 50 words. Her advisor says the strongest material is the English-learning paragraph, but Maria feels the debate club story shows the most growth. She has one evening to revise and cannot add new content, only cut and tighten. She also notices her introduction spends 40 words restating the prompt almost word for word.
1. How many words must Maria cut to meet the limit, and what is the most defensible first move given her constraints?
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She is at 680 and the cap is 500, so she must cut 180 words. The most defensible first move is to cut the 40 words of prompt-restating in her introduction, since that content adds nothing the reader does not already know. That leaves 140 words still to cut. Cutting the restated prompt first is low-risk because it does not touch any of the substantive stories, so it preserves her options for the harder decision about which body paragraph to shrink.
2. Maria must choose between trimming the debate paragraph and trimming the English paragraph. Using the advisor's feedback and her own view, recommend a strategy and justify it.
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A strong answer separates two different questions: which story is strongest and which story best fits the prompt. The advisor judges the English paragraph strongest as writing; Maria judges the debate paragraph strongest as evidence of growth. Neither judgment alone settles it. A defensible strategy is to keep both stories but compress each, rather than deleting one outright. For example, cut the debate paragraph from 150 to about 90 words (saving 60) and the English paragraph from 180 to about 130 (saving 50), which together with the 40-word intro cut and modest tightening elsewhere reaches 180. This honors both perspectives and keeps the essay's range. The key reasoning is that the 180-word target is a budget to allocate, not a single paragraph to sacrifice.