How to Start a College Essay

Forty minutes, one empty page

It is July, and a student opens a new document to begin her college essay. She types "Throughout my life," and deletes it. She tries a quotation from a famous scientist and deletes that too. Forty minutes later, the page holds her name and the date.

She is not short of ideas. She already knows her topic: the three years she spent keeping the scorebook for her younger brother's baseball team. She even knows roughly what she wants to say about it. What she cannot find is the sentence the essay should begin with, and she believes she cannot write anything else until she has it.

Starting is two problems, not one

When students say they cannot start, they usually mean two different things at once.

The first problem is getting words onto the page at all. The second is writing the opening lines that an admissions reader will see. Most students try to solve the second problem first, and that is why they get stuck. The opening is the hardest part of the essay to write, and it is the part you know the least about until the rest exists.

And we are not the only ones who believe that. The very people who read these essays give some clues in this direction.

• Brown's Pre-College Programs advise students writing a first draft not to worry about making it perfect, and to focus on getting their thoughts down.
• Johns Hopkins publishes essays it admired from admitted students. Recent ones grew out of baking and out of cleaning a closet, which shows how ordinary the starting material can be.

So the two problems are best handled in order: first the draft, then the opening.

Part one: getting a first draft going

The goal of a first draft is to have material to work with. It does not need good sentences, and nobody else has to read it. Here are four ways to get one written.

1. Tell the story out loud first

Use your phone to record yourself telling the story to a parent or a friend, in about three minutes. Then type out what you said. People rarely freeze when they talk, and the spoken version comes out in a natural order and in your own words.

2. Begin with the part you remember best

You do not have to write the essay from top to bottom. Start with the scene that is clearest in your memory, even if it belongs in the middle. The student with the scorebook could begin with the afternoon her brother's coach first asked to look at her notes. The parts before and after it are easier to write once that scene is on the page.

3. Write a rough version on purpose

Set a timer for 25 minutes and write without stopping to fix anything. Do not delete, and do not reread until the timer ends. Save the file with the word "rough" in its name, as a reminder that this version is supposed to be messy.

4. Answer questions instead of writing an essay

Ask someone to interview you about your topic, or write the questions down and answer them yourself. What happened? What did you do? What surprised you? What do you do differently now? Type your answers as plain sentences. By the end you will have several paragraphs, and you never had to face an empty page.

One practical point applies to all four. Write in an ordinary document and not inside the application form. Georgia Tech gives applicants the same advice, and suggests pasting the essay into the application afterwards.