The Elusive First Line of the College Essay

a boy in blue shirt thinking about writing the first line of the essay

Thousands of college seniors are struggling with the elusive college essay. For a lucky few it is easy to come by. Words just begin flowing and before you know it, your personal statement is done. For the majority of students, writing the perfect essay can be a grueling and stressful process. The pressure for it to be unique, coherent, comprehensive and overall, perfect is undeniable.

As an admissions officer, I read hundreds of essays a year. Sometimes I read over 50 in a day. The reality is that after a while they all begin to blur together. The essays that stand out are the ones that obviously left a lasting impression, but what is the best way to get there?

I can’t begin to tell you how many essays I read about influential people, especially family members. But no matter what the topic was, it was the first line of an essay that would keep me going. Usually, by the time I finished the first paragraph, I could tell if the essay was going to be a winner or a dud.

Bennington College and Stanford University have both published sample first lines of the college essays of their first year classes. These are great examples of unique and captivating ways to begin and essay.

So how do you get that stellar first line? Here are my suggestions:

Don’t write the first line first.

Sometimes it is easier to write the entire essay, then think of the appropriate introduction.

What do you say if you have nothing to say?

So you may not have experienced some great tragedy in your life and you still have yet to win a Noble Prize, but I bet you still have something interesting to say. Brainstorm some thoughts with friends and family members. Think about conversations, photographs, observations you have made of other people, anything can be a source of inspiration.

Offer a unique perspective.

The examples from Bennington and Stanford do talk about once in a lifetime experiences, but they also show examples of students who just have unique perspectives on life. One example is to just comment on a unique thought you may have.  My favorite is “I change my name every time I place an order at Starbucks.” This is not an essay that is going to be the same as the next student in the pile.

Quotes are a great source for inspiration.

Another first liner from Stanford talks about how the student’s little sister was upset by a slogan on a t-shirt. Writing about a slogan or quote is a great way to show your opinion, which also lets the admission officer get to know you.

What would you do?

Think of a hypothetical situation and talk about how you would handle it. From the Bennington post, one student talks about how he or she would design a library.

Don’t be afraid to get personal.

Some students are afraid to talk about something that is really personal to them, but I have found that students write best about things that have deeply affected them. In our “Five Essential Tips for a Perfect College Essay” post, we talked about showing some vulnerability. Remember, the essay will be read by a select few and you will probably never see the admission officers who have read your essay once you enter college.

As with all of our posts on college essays, I must stress the importance of proofreading. Make sure there are no big mistakes that make your essay stand out for the wrong reason!

Katherine Price
College Essay Reader

Big Mistakes on College Admission Essays

I ran across these hilarious mistakes on college admissions essays submitted to Vassar and Bates colleges. You can find them here at Beliefnet.com.
I laughed. And then I cried, knowing how much the staff of the admissions officers were laughing–as they sent out the rejection letters.
Always, always proofread those essays, folks.  And don’t leave them to your eyes alone.  Have others read them–just to make sure  you don’t leave any bloopers behind.
Mark Montgomery
College Essay Editor

Are High School Grads Ready to Write at the College Level? Nope.

Most high school teachers I have met believe that one of their critical responsibilities is to help their students become better writers.
Scores on the ACT writing tests tell us that students entering high school are not very well prepared in writing. Add to this that state colleges and universities are often placing as many as 30% of their students in remedial, general education courses if they cannot pass basic writing requirements. Further, according to research by ACT (which was presented at a conference I attended yesterday sponsored by ACT), there is a disconnect between what high school teachers believe high education wants them to do, and what they actually do.
The ACT survey research indicated that high school teachers want their students to develop their voice, to analyze multiple perspectives, and write longer papers. College professors, on the other hand, would prefer that high school teachers focus on mechanics and presenting a single, coherent thesis.
An article in this week’s Education Week reinforces this point. Steven Horwitz, a professor at St. Lawrence University in New York, picks up on the ACT research. He summarizes it this way:

Teachers of the students who graduated from American high schools in the spring may think that their charges are well prepared for the colleges they are entering this fall, but the professors who will greet them on campus disagree, according to a recent national survey.
The differences in perception among the 6,568 teachers and professors who responded to the survey, conducted by the educational testing organization ACT Inc., were apparent in virtually every college-preparatory subject.
Perhaps most significantly, the high school teachers surveyed had more confidence that their students were prepared to handle the fundamentals of writing–basic grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation–than the college professors did.

My own experience as a college professor bears this out. While I wanted to help students advance their thinking about political science or international relations, I often had a difficult time wading through tortured prose, run-on sentences, and butchered punctuation to get at their ideas. Many–even at a private university like the University of Denver–had difficulty expressing themselves using proper form. If the learned the basics of expository writing in high school, they seem to have forgotten everything by the time they entered my classroom. Of course, some students were elegant writers. But they constituted the minority.
Horwitz also bemoans the fact that students do not know how to undertake the most basic research, even though they may have been assigned “research papers” in high school. I bemoaned this, too, in my students’ writing…to the point I had to create research projects that did not include writing at all–just so I could teach them how to find and interpret information from a wide variety of resources.
In addition to calling for increased attention to the mechanics of good writing, Horwitz makes some excellent suggestions for high school teachers as they prepare their students for college writing and research. They bear repeating.

Begin to gauge the research process itself, but in short, focused assignments that help students become comfortable recognizing and evaluating the different types of sources and the differences between the Web and library databases.
Use short assignments that ask students to try to identify the various positions that sources take on a controversial topic and the core of their disagreements, even if that does not involve taking a position of their own.
Work with students on the ethical and accurate use of sources before they begin to do actual research, so that they understand that this is not just an “Internet problem” but an obligation central to all the writing they do, whether the sources is a course reading or textbook, or the research materials the find using and old-fashioned paper index or a library database.

I would say that if a student is a good writer by 11th grade, she has a much better chance of writing a solid college application essay. Though I am a consultant helping students present themselves as best they can, there is only so much writing I can teach in the advising process. And ethically, I cannot write students’ essays for them. It pains me when I see clients whose writing is sub-par–who are are not really ready for college-level writing. Even if they get in to the college of their choice, these students will have a hard row to hoe when they do land on a college campus.
Mark Montgomery
Montgomery Educational Consulting
Writing Coach and Teacher

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Authenticity Is Key on the Application

The headline of an MSNBC article last week screams, “Typo On Your College Application May Get You In.” The insinuation is that if you make some mistakes on the application you look more human and less like an automaton.
But the real point of this article is on the essay: demonstrating some humility, a bit of human frailty, or a dose of self-awareness is likely to lead to a more informative essay than one that shouts out your accomplishments, your invincibility, and your ability to overcome anything life might throw at you.
Super-heroes are out. Real people are in.
Literally.
Here’s an excerpt from the article:

In an age when applicants all seem to have volunteered, played sports and traveled abroad, colleges are wary of slick packaging. They’re drawn to high grades and test scores, of course, but also to humility and to students who really got something out of their experiences, not just those trying to impress colleges with their resume.
The trend seemingly should make life easier for students — by reducing the pressure to puff up their credentials. But that’s not always the case.
For some students, the challenge of presenting themselves as full, flawed people cuts against everything else they’ve been told about applying to college — to show off as much as possible.

My advice to students is to not pretend. To be themselves. Not to be afraid to demonstrate their humanity.
I also make clear that the essay is theirs: I won’t write it for them. Of course I provide pointers and ideas for restructuring, and clarifying points. But I try not to put ideas into their heads or words into their mouths. As a professor, I taught college students for years how to write term papers, how to construct an elegant paragraph, how to develop the trickle of an idea into a gushing torrent of insight. It’s something that I enjoy, and frankly I’m pretty good at it.
My aim is to guide from the side, provide counsel, and set the course. The navigation of the essay is up to the student.
Mark Montgomery
Montgomery Educational Consulting
“Mapping College Journeys”

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