Getting Ready To Get Involved in Essay Contests

EU Essay Contest Winners, 2014

Till now, the European Union has conducted its essay contest twice since 2013. In the first year of the event, I was the third prize winner; and this year, I appeared first in the result list. Here, I would like to share some experience and suggestions that might be useful for those who wish to join such a competition. Grabbing an opportunity is important, but knowing our real ability before getting involved should be done first if we want to succeed. To me personally, I would get myself
ready for such an event by sharpening the required ability first.

Extracts of the top three essays

 In such competition, I see that not only is a good English command needed, but also the ideas we have about the topic provided. So, before starting the first line, we should have a comparatively good command of English first. To strengthen our English capacity, I would suggest that we crave for what is taught at school and constantly notice what can be learnt outside, both grammar and vocabulary. When we are confident in our English, then it is time to start. For the competition as such, we should prepare well before starting the writing. When we have chosen the topic, we need to get ourselves ready by finding whatever related sources and read them as much as we can in order to build our ground knowledge and also strengthen the vocabulary needed for the writing because there is a quote that goes “a good writer reads well; a good reader writes well”. Then while writing, I would suggest that we pretend to be both a reader and a writer and ask ourselves whether each of sentences is well and meaningfully constructed until the end of the writing process in order to minimize the mistakes in terms of language use and ideas about the topic chosen.

We should never neglect any grammar points that we are not sure of. When the whole work is finished, there comes a time for thorough proofreading that should be done as many times as possible until it is impossible for the proofreader to find any more mistakes in the work. This method works well for me; and I hope it works for others too.

Winner of the topic of"Migration and development in
Cambodia: challenges and opportunities"