Eligibility:
Each year before the end of April, new rules for the Walsh Award and the other ACES scholarships are posted on this page. Below are the rules and exercises for the 2019-20 competitions.
Applicants must be seeking degrees as enrolled college/university juniors, seniors, or graduate students during the summer and/or fall term in 2019. Scholarships are awarded without regard to the student’s major or field of academic concentration. Previous scholarship winners are not eligible.
Requirements:
The
specifics for all six scholarships are below. Applications must be
emailed by the end of Nov. 15. All entry materials must be in
English.
The
Bill Walsh scholarship will go to an applicant who aspires to edit
news and who demonstrates the talent and passion for language that
Bill devoted his life to.
Applicants
for the other five scholarships should have a commitment to a career
in the editing of written materials and demonstrate effectiveness in
doing so.
By
submitting a separate application for each, an entrant can seek both
the Walsh and one of the other scholarships, but can win only one.
The six steps to apply for the Walsh scholarship
1. Provide
your résumé, with evidence of academic achievement and exemplary
work in editing. Please include information on other
substantial achievements/activities/interests.
2. References: Provide the names and titles or job descriptions of a total of three instructors and/or work supervisors, and their contact information.
3. Consider the following situation and then write, in 500 or fewer words, about what you would do if you were the rookie copy editor.
- The newsroom learns of the leak of a highly personal and acrimonious email exchange between two recently retired high public officials with prominent local family connections. The emails, which concern a controversial public issue, clearly seem authentic. In the newsroom debate about what to do (and about what other newsrooms may do at any moment), two senior editors on opposite sides of whether and what to publish suddenly turn to the rookie copy editor and ask: What would you do? One of the senior editors is the copy editor’s supervisor who, within a month, will decide whether to make the young editor’s hiring permanent.
4. By rewriting it, edit the following first paragraph of a news article to make it clearer, more reader-engaging, and no less accurate.
- WASHINGTON – Failing to confront a clear challenge from the US Senate, the House delayed passage Wednesday of legislation to increase the federal penalty for election fraud. The measure would raise the maximum sentence for violating current rules to ten years and/or a $500,000 fine. GOP senators supporting the measure accuse Democrats of being soft on the issue and want enforcement beefed up, especially in border cities of the Southwest such as San Antonio, Albuquerque, El Paso, Tampa and Galveston. One of the only local Republicans opposing the measure is a candidate for Galveston’s mayoralty.
5. Write a headline using no more than nine words for each of these three pieces of news:
- A. Global finance officials are pledging closer cooperation in efforts to lift the world economy out its current slowdown, but tensions persist on a number of fronts between the United States and other nations over trade and other issues.
- B. False claims are 70% more likely than true ones to be shared on Twitter, research has found. Overall, false news travels faster, farther and deeper through the social network than true news, according to researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Those patterns applied to every subject they studied, they said, not only politics and urban legends, but also business, science and technology.
- C. ALBANY, N.Y. – As the state budget stalemate persisted into a third week, bickering legislators received a tongue-lashing at a news conference called Monday by the lame-duck governor, who admonished them in blistering tones as failing to make use of “all the hard work that’s been done by the lobbyists.”
6. What is the worst thing a copy editor can do or allow regarding the editing of a news story? And why do you think it is the worst?
Using one or more Word or PDF attachments, email your complete application – with “Walsh scholarship” in the message field – to alex@aceseditors.org.
The four steps to apply for an ACES Education Fund scholarship
1. Provide your résumé, with evidence of academic achievement and exemplary work in editing. Please include information on other substantial achievements/activities/interests.
2. References: Provide the names and titles or job descriptions of a total of three instructors and/or work supervisors, and their contact information.
3. Please respond in 500 words or fewer to this: If you could pose one question to a group of 700 editors – such as might be found at an ACES national conference – what would it be, and why would you choose that question?
4. Write a summary or headline (in ten or fewer words) for each of these three pieces:
- A. What made the rock era stand out aurally is to be on display starting Nov. 20 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in a show called “Play It Loud,” which features guitars played by the greats of Sixties rock. The show is going on in New York now and includes over 130 instruments from 1939 to 2017.
- B. Counterintuitive as it may seem, white voices carry a weight on matters of race that a black person’s does not, if only because other white people can’t dismiss their advocacy as self-interest. They will be heard in ways and places black people never will.
- C. Researchers may be closing in on a way to check athletes while they’re alive for signs of a degenerative brain disease that has been linked to frequent head blows. Experimental scans found higher levels of an abnormal protein tied to the disease in a study of former National Football League players who were having mood and thinking problems.
Using one or more Word or PDF attachments, email your complete application – with “ACES scholarship” in the message field – to alex@aceseditors.org.
Donate to the ACES Education Fund:
