The Bottom Line: How to Start a College Essay. The college essay introduction should hook your reader and make her want to know more and read more. Good personal statement introductions will contain the following features: A killer first line; A detailed description of an experience from your life · The Parts of a College Essay Introduction. Your intro tells your reader what to expect from your essay. Think of it as a brief roadmap that begins with an intriguing opening line, includes a quick summary of the topic and ideas you’ll present, and concludes with a thesis blogger.comted Reading Time: 5 mins · 9 WAYS TO START A COLLEGE ESSAY: The Full Hemingway. An image-based description that focuses on a particular moment and doesn’t explain much—at least not right away. This technique The Mini Hemingway. The Twist. The Philosophical Question. The Confession. Estimated Reading Time: 7 mins
How To Start a College Essay: 9 Effective Techniques
College Essays. If you've been sitting in front of a blank screen, unsure of exactly how to start a personal statement for college, then believe me—I feel your pain. A great college essay introduction is key to making your essay stand out, so there's a lot of pressure to get it right. Luckily, being able to craft the perfect beginning for your admissions essay is just like many other writing skills— something you can get better at with practice and by learning from examples.
In this article, I'll walk you through exactly how to start a college essay. We'll cover what makes best way to start a college essay great personal statement introduction and how the first part of your essay should be structured. We'll also best way to start a college essay at several great examples of essay beginnings and explain why they work, how they work, and what you can learn from them, best way to start a college essay.
Before we talk about how to start a college essay, let's discuss the role of the introduction. Just as your college essay is your chance to introduce yourself to the admissions best way to start a college essay of your target college, your essay's beginning is your chance to introduce your writing. In general, college essays make it easier to get to know the parts of you not in your transcript —these include your personality, best way to start a college essay, outlook on life, passions, and experiences.
You're not writing for yourself but for a very specific kind of reader. Picture it: your audience is an admissions officer who has read thousands and thousands of essays.
This person is disposed to be friendly and curious, but if she hasn't already seen it all she's probably seen a good portion of it. Your essay's job is to entertain and impress this person, and to make you memorable so you don't merely blend into the sea of other personal statements.
Like all attempts at charm, you must be slightly bold and out of the ordinary—but you must also stay away from crossing the line into offensiveness or bad taste. The personal statement introduction is basically the wriggly worm that baits the hook to catch your reader. It's vital to grab attention from the get-go—the more awake and eager your audience is, the more likely it is that what you say will really land.
How do you go about crafting an introduction that successfully hooks your reader? Let's talk about how to structure the beginning of your college essay. Teenagers hard at work on their college applications. To see how the introduction fits into an essay, let's look at the big structural picture first and then zoom in. Even though they're called essays, best way to start a college essay statements are really more like best way to start a college essay mix of a short story and a philosophy or psychology class that's all about you.
Usually, how this translates is that you start with a really good and very short story about something arresting, unusual, or important that happened to you. This is not to say that the story has to be about something important or unusual in the grand scheme of things—it just has to be a moment that stands out to you as defining in some way, or an explanation of why you are the way you are.
You then pivot to an explanation of why this story is an accurate illustration of one of your core qualities, values, or beliefs. Best way to start a college essay story typically comes in the first half of the essay, and the insightful explanation comes second —but, of course, all rules were made to be broken, and some great essays flip this more traditional order.
Now, let's zero in on the first part of the college essay. What are the ingredients of a great personal statement introduction? I'll list them here and then dissect them one by one in the next section:. You've got your reader's attention when you see its furry ears extended … No, wait. You've got your squirrel's attention. Want to write the perfect college application essay? Get professional help from PrepScholar. Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up.
We'll learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay that you'll proudly submit to your top choice colleges. Don't leave your college application to chance. Find out more about PrepScholar Admissions now :. Here's a weird secret that's true for most written work: just because it'll end up at the beginning doesn't mean you have to write it first.
For example, in this case, you can't know what your killer first sentence will be until you've figured out the following details:. So my suggestion is to work in reverse order! Writing your essay will be much easier if you can figure out the entirety of it first and then go back and work out exactly how it should start.
This means that before you can craft your ideal first sentence, the way the short story experience of your life will play out on the page, and the perfect pivoting moment that transitions from your story to your insight, you must work out a general idea about which life event you will share and what you expect that life event to demonstrate to the reader about you and the kind of person you are.
If you're having trouble coming up with a topic, check out our guide on brainstorming college essay ideas. It might also be helpful to read our guides to specific application essays, best way to start a college essay, such as picking your best Common App prompt and writing a perfect University of California personal statement.
In the next sections of this article, I'll talk about how to work backwards on the introduction, moving from bigger to smaller elements: starting with the first section of the essay in general and then honing your pivot sentence and your first sentence.
Don't get too excited about working in reverse—not all activities are safe to do backwards. In a word essay, this section will take up about the first half of the essay and will mostly consist of a brief story that illuminates a key experience, an important character trait, a moment of transition or transformation, or a step toward maturity.
Once you've figured out your topic and zeroed in on the experience you want to highlight in the beginning of your essay, here are 2 great approaches to making it into a story:. Later, as you listen to the recorded story to try to get a sense of how to write it, you can also get a sense of the tone with which you want to tell your story. Are you being funny as you talk? Trying to shock, surprise, or astound your audience? The way you most naturally tell your story is the way you should write it.
After you've done this storyteller exercise, best way to start a college essay, write down the salient points of what you learned. What is the story your essay will tell? What is the point about your life, point of view, or personality it will make? What tone will you tell it with?
Sketch out a detailed outline so that you can start filling in the pieces as we work through how to write the introductory sections. Baron Munchausen didn't know whether to tell his story sad that his horse had been cut in half, or delighted by knowing what would happen if half a horse drank from a fountain. In general, your essay's first sentence should be either a mini-cliffhanger that sets up a situation the reader would like to see resolved, or really lush scene-setting that situates your audience in a place and time they can readily visualize.
The former builds expectations and evokes curiosity, and the latter stimulates the imagination and creates a connection with the author. In both cases, you hit your goal of greater reader engagement. Now, I'm going to show you how these principles work for all types of first sentences, whether in college essays or in famous works of fiction. The experience of coming out is raw and emotional, and the issue of LGBTQ rights is an important facet of modern life.
This three-word sentence immediately sums up an enormous background of the personal and political. Wolf, my fourth-grade band teacher, as he lifted the heavy tuba and put it into my arms.
Matt Coppo '07 for Hamilton College. This sentence conjures up a funny image—we can immediately picture the larger adult standing next to a little kid holding a giant tuba. It also does a little play on words: "handle it" can refer to both the literal tuba Matt is being asked to hold and the figurative stress of playing the instrument. I live alone—I always have since elementary school. Kevin Zevallos '16 for Connecticut College.
This opener definitely makes us want to know more. Why was he alone? Where were the protective grown-ups who surround most kids? How on earth could a little kid of years old survive on his own? I have old hands. First line from a student in Stanford's class of There's nothing but questions here. What are "old" hands? Are they old-looking? How has having these hands affected the author? There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre. There's immediately a feeling of disappointment and the stifled desire for action here. Who wanted to go for a walk? And why was this person being prevented from going? We met for lunch at El Burrito Mexicano, a tiny Mexican lunch counter under the Red Line "El" tracks.
Ted Mullin '06 for Carleton College. Look at how much specificity this sentence packs in less than 20 words. Each noun and adjective is chosen for its ability to convey yet another detail. Maybe it's because I live in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where Brett Favre draws more of a crowd on Sunday than any religious service, cheese is a staple food, it's sub-zero during global warming, current "fashions" come three years after they've hit it big with the rest of the world, best way to start a college essay, and where all children by the age of ten can use a gauge like it's their job.
Riley Smith '12 for Hamilton College, best way to start a college essay. This sentence manages to hit every stereotype about Wisconsin held by outsiders—football, cheese, polar winters, best way to start a college essay, backwardness, and guns—and this piling on gives us a good sense of place while also creating enough hyperbole to be funny. At the same time, the sentence raises the tantalizing question: maybe what is because of Wisconsin?
High, high above the North Pole, on the first day oftwo professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of miles per hour. David Lodge, Changing Places, best way to start a college essay. This sentence is structured in the highly specific style of a math problem, which makes it funny. However, at the heart of this sentence lies a mystery that grabs the reader's interest: why on earth would these two people be doing this? The majority of college applicants are high school seniors, and most of the college application advice out there is aimed at them.
HOW TO WRITE COLLEGE ESSAYS - A STEP BY STEP PROCESS
, time: 12:1413 Engaging Ways to Begin an Essay
· The Parts of a College Essay Introduction. Your intro tells your reader what to expect from your essay. Think of it as a brief roadmap that begins with an intriguing opening line, includes a quick summary of the topic and ideas you’ll present, and concludes with a thesis blogger.comted Reading Time: 5 mins · 9 WAYS TO START A COLLEGE ESSAY: The Full Hemingway. An image-based description that focuses on a particular moment and doesn’t explain much—at least not right away. This technique The Mini Hemingway. The Twist. The Philosophical Question. The Confession. Estimated Reading Time: 7 mins The Bottom Line: How to Start a College Essay. The college essay introduction should hook your reader and make her want to know more and read more. Good personal statement introductions will contain the following features: A killer first line; A detailed description of an experience from your life
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