Worksheets

Essay Planning Worksheets

Great essays don’t start fully formed. They start with ideas, reflection, and a little structure. These worksheets are here to help you get organized, dig deep into your experiences, and build a strong foundation for your writing.

Whether you're brainstorming topics, outlining your story, or revising a draft, these tools will guide you step-by-step. You’ll find:

Prompts to help you reflect on your strengths, challenges, and goals
Organizers for mapping out essay structure
Checklists to review and polish your writing
Exercises to strengthen storytelling and clarity

Use them at your own pace—and come back to them anytime you need a boost. Your story is worth telling well, and these worksheets are here to help you do just that.

Prompts to Practice with

Tell us about yourself. (Your background, goals, interests, or anything that helps us get to know you.)
Describe a challenge or obstacle you’ve overcome and what you learned from it.
What does success mean to you?
Describe a time you made a meaningful impact on your community or someone else’s life.
Talk about a failure and how it shaped you.
Explain how your background has influenced your academic or career goals.
If you had the power to change one thing in your community, state, or world, what would it be, and why?
Discuss a time when you stood up for something you believed in.
What is a talent, passion, or skill you have, and how has it shaped who you are?
Describe a personal achievement that makes you proud.
Why do you deserve this scholarship?
What career do you plan to pursue and why?
Who or what inspires you, and how has that shaped your goals or values?
If you could have a conversation with any person (living or deceased), who would it be and why?
How will this scholarship help you reach your goals?

1. Introduction a. attention grabbing first sentence b. brief explanation for opening c. thesis statement (address the prompt) 2. body a. elaborate on your thesis - follow your points! b. describe any obstacles you encountered c. describe how you overcame these 3. conclusion a. explain how this experience mirrors your audience and their values/beliefs b. emphasize any lessons you learned c. thank the committee reviewing your essay

Tips from CollegeEssay.org

This is a wonderful sheet to use as a checklist! As you prepare to write your essay, flip through this PDF and ensure that you have all the pieces a successful essay requires.

Essay Tips

How to Prepare to Write Your Essay
Tips from Pierce College

From brainstorming to the finishing touches, this is a wonderful template to use. Often, we will be faced with open topic essays and no idea what to write about. This is a solid outline that will help you from beginning to end in ensuring that everything you need to create your essay is successful.

Tips from Pierce College

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