How to Write Exciting Intros for your College Essays
by Michelle
It’s 8pm on a weekday and you’re sitting in front of your computer, ready to keep going with your drafts on your essays for your college application. Instead of sitting uncomfortably in a creaky desk chair with the white light of the screen burning your eyes, you imagine yourself somewhere else. Maybe a beach, on a warm, lazy afternoon.
You’re looking out at the water, watching the ocean waves roll in and out under the sun. It’s nice. Soothing.
After two hours however, you can’t help but start to get a little bored. There’s nothing else to look at but the water.
Suddenly—you see ripples. You put your hand over your eyes, shading it from the sun. The water bubbles and parts—a giant shape emerges.
A massive whale breaches the surface, its body seemingly huge enough to blot out the sun. Then it dives back into the ocean with a splash.
“Wow!” you think. “I can’t believe I saw that!”
You want your essay introduction to provoke the same excitement, the same ‘Wow!’ feelings you got when you saw something disrupt the status quo—in this case, the whale jumping from the water. You do not need to begin the scene from the long moments of calm when nothing was happening in the sea.
What are some ways you can use to write exciting intros for your college essays?
Tip 1: Make the normal –> unusual
When writing an introduction, take a normal, ordinary sentence describing something from your memory, and see how you can turn it into something unusual and surprising to the reader, whether by adding more details, describing it in a unique way, or evoking a mood or emotion into it.
Normal but bland introduction sentence:
I get home and approach my messy desk, which is stacked with books and comics and some of my half-finished robotic projects.
Fun and unusual introduction:
I thump up the stairs to my room and approach my messy desk. A linguistics text on IPA for beginners rests next to a compilation of steampunk noir webcomics. A tiny potted cactus, affectionately dubbed ‘Bowser,’ sits amiably beside loops of wire and 3D printed parts for a robotics project in progress.
While both sentences seem to give the same information, what differences do you spot between them?
Tip 2: Detailed knowledge
Maybe you want your introduction to help lead the way into an essay about your love for a certain subject like English or coding or chemistry. It’s not enough for you to simply state “I love math and took a lot of difficult math courses in high school!” and have that be exciting to read as a starting sentence.
Think smaller. Pick a certain work, or a subtopic, or a niche area related to the subject you love and show that detailed knowledge through your introduction.
Instead of talking about your love for math on the whole, maybe mention your curiosity on what riding a roller coaster shaped like a Mobius strip would feel like. Instead of jumping into your knowledge of detailed chemistry equations, maybe discuss what chemical reactions are happening in a bottle of hair dye when you changed your hair for a drama performance.
Tip 3: Make it personal
A last tip you can use to make your introduction exciting to read is to make it personal. Make your writing emotional.
You can talk to the reader through your introduction and have them feel what you were feeling in a scene. You can do this in writing by describing your state of mind or feelings in a scene.
In one introduction, instead of writing it from a distanced way, like “I felt troubled when our car broke down on our way to the qualifying final round of the tournament” consider revising it instead.
Revised version: “I bit back the frustrated yell I wanted to let out. The car was down, the engine letting out ominous wheezes when we tried to restart it. The car I had been driving was supposed to bear us to victory to the building where the finals for the tournament would take place. Instead, here we were, choking on the dust by the side of the road, all internet bars unhelpfully showing up as zero when we tried to look up a car repair place.”
With these tips, you too, as an Essay Narwhal can write an introduction for your essay that dazzles instead of bringing on yawns.
