Writing a good introduction to a college admission essay if you submit a poor college entrance essay, you can forget about going to your school of choice. Its like going to the admission interview and having a weak handshake or not shaking hands at all and just sitting down. If your first impression is a bad one, the admissions officer will simply move on to the next person. On the other hand, if you submit a great entrance essay youll put yourself ahead of the competition, and it all begins with the introduction. With so many different questions from colleges, its hard to give perfect advice as to how you should approach each one. But it is useful to know what to avoid when writing your introduction, as the most common mistakes can disqualify you quickly from your favorite college. This photo licensed under cc attribution share alike 2.o generic and the work of b.

Your application essay introduction is the schools first chance to really hear from you in your own words. Your introduction needs to establish your ability to communicate and set an interesting tone that makes them want to keep reading. But something like your college entrance essay is a very important part of your application is boring because it doesnt say anything you dont already know. Many people would simply stop reading, and you dont want that to happen with your entrance essay. Tampa bay rays fans run the boston marathon photo by stewart dawson lets say the topic is describe a challenging goal you worked hard to accomplish.

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If your introduction reads something like training for the boston marathon was a challenging goal and i worked very hard to prepare for it, youre already off to a bad start. Youre just repeating the question back to the reader and not offering enough of yourself in the story. Even if the rest of the essay is personal and written well, it wont matter if the opening is dull. Runs in rain, fog and snow, a radical change to my diet and an uncomfortable exercise schedule that made me want to quit several times. It was the most difficult six months of my life and i wouldnt trade a moment of it. With that introduction youre explaining exactly why your training was so challenging.

You admitted there were times you wanted to give up, but you stayed the course and learned to appreciate the difficult journey. You let them into your life and showed how youve grown, and you did it in two sentences. mistake 2: dont actually address the college application essay topic. The essay is not a springboard for you to stray off topic and tell them something different about yourself. Part of the evaluation of your essay involves whether or not you can follow directions and tell them what they want to know. If you cant follow simple directions during the application process, especially the introduction to your essay, it doesnt speak well for your future prospects in college. If the topic is describe a time you attempted something and failed, dont write something like i was nervous about trying out for the varsity football team, but after a lot of hard work i finally earned a spot.

Thats not failing.thats a story about working to accomplish a goal, and its not what they asked. Try something like when i ran for student government in my senior year i planned out what i wanted to accomplish in office, i spent many hours making signs and i spent six weeks drafting an effective speech. I was very disappointed when i lost the election, but the process taught me a lot about dealing with failure and sparked an interest in public service. After the introduction youll have time to describe exactly what you learned from defeat. You can mention how you were proud of the campaign you ran, how you congratulated the winner and how it made you more interested in serving in student government in some other capacity, rather than making you frustrated and bitter. If you dont address the topic in your introduction, the best writing wont excuse that glaring error.

If you make sure you have an interesting introduction that addresses the topic clearly, youll give yourself an edge over your competition and a better chance of writing an excellent college application essay. If you are interested in some specific advice on how to make yours better, contact eric at 813.787.8959. He has helped students gain craft essays which resulted in admission to emory, university of florida, loyola, fsu and many other top schools.

This entry was posted on thursday, december 30th, 2010 at 1 pm you can follow any responses to this entry through the rss 2.0 feed. The introduction is the most important part of your essay, and it has one purpose to fulfill above all others: to draw in the reader. Ideally this should all begin right from the attention grabbing opening sentence. If the introduction can then go on to orient the reader to the focus of the essay, then that can be very helpful. Orientation, however, is not an essential purpose because that can be achieved gradually in the essay.

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Many people make the mistake of writing a paragraph that explains what they are going to talk about in the rest of the essay. Such a paragraph might include something such as the following: my journey toward college has been shaped by a variety of experiences, including academic studies, volunteer work, and extracurricular activities. The reader knows that you are going to talk about these things and is most likely muttering to himself, get to the point. If you have a paragraph such as this in your essay, the best move is to delete it. Often your second paragraph, which begins to discuss a specific experience, will work much better as an introduction. In general, you should bring your most compelling experience to the forefront and then structure your essay around that.

Some people will start with a compelling experience but will insist upon prefacing that experience with a very generic statement such as the following: i want to go to college to learn and achieve my goals. Often the reason people will write such a statement is that they feel compelled to restate the question in some way. If your essay is answering the question why do you want to go to college? you should be able to demonstrate your reasons without relying on such a bland summary sentence. Consider this applicant's introduction: i can't tell you in which peer group i'd fit best because i'm a social chameleon and am comfortable in most i will instead describe my own social situation and the various cliques i drift in and out of. This applicant writes what starts out as a potentially engaging introduction, but the paragraph immediately loses the reader's interest by telling him what the applicant is going to write about.

Now consider the applicant's second paragraph: my high school's student body is from a part of town that is much more diverse than the rest of the city, and the city as a whole is more diverse than most of the state. The location of my school, only a few blocks from the university of oregon, is greatly responsible for the social atmosphere. Whereas the other high schools in town draw mainly from middle class white suburban families, mine sits in the division between the poor west university neighborhood and the affluent east university one. East university is hilly and forested with quiet residential streets and peaceful, large houses.

A few blocks west, using the university as the divider, the houses become small and seedy. On the west side of my school there are many dirty apartments crime is high and social status is low. Here, the writer engages the reader by providing a vivid description of the locale of his home and school. He probably felt he needed the introductory paragraph so the reader would not be confused by his second paragraph. However, by adding such a short and bland introduction, he has decreased the effectiveness of his personal statement.

Let your story flow, engaging the reader and gradually relating setting and context. One effective way to grab the reader's attention is to describe the action of your story. Clear yor mind by zinking of somezing plasant.' for five minutes, all of us found ourselves sitting cross legged on the floor with a soft, sleepy look on our faces as we subconsciously nodded to the soothing rhythmic voice of our french teacher.

Our heads were still half wafting in the delicious swirls of dreamland, barely dwelling in the bittersweet shock of reality. Time whizzed by swiftly and we were forced to tend to the grueling task of untangling our aching frames, stiffened from prolonged straining positions. This applicant lets the reader know the setting mdash his french class mdash even though he never explicitly states the location of the story.