How to Start a Common App Essay

The revision that fixes most drafts: cut paragraph one

Read your draft starting from the second paragraph. In most cases nothing is lost.

First paragraphs are usually where writers warm up: setting a scene, providing context, explaining who everyone is, announcing what the essay will be about. All necessary for the writer, none of it for the reader. The essay genuinely begins where something happens.

The bonus is roughly a hundred words back, which in a 650-word limit is substantial, and an opening that starts inside the story rather than outside it.

Five openings that hurt you

The dictionary definition. "Merriam-Webster defines resilience as…" Readers have seen this since before you were born. It also signals that the essay will be about an abstraction rather than a person.

The quotation. Opening with Gandhi, Mandela, Jobs or Einstein gives the first line of your essay to somebody else. If a quotation genuinely matters to the piece it can appear later; it should not be the first thing about you that a reader encounters.

The thesis statement. "In this essay I will describe how my experience volunteering shaped my perspective." This is an academic habit and it flattens the essay immediately, because you have announced the ending before starting.

The universal claim. "Life is full of unexpected challenges." "Everyone faces adversity at some point." True of everybody, therefore about nobody.

The forced shock. A dramatic line engineered for attention — a death, a hospital, a scream — that turns out to be a metaphor or a dream. Readers feel manipulated, and the rest of the essay is read with suspicion.

What good openings actually do

They start in motion, at a specific moment, with concrete detail, and they trust the reader to catch up. No scene-setting, no context paragraph, no announcement of theme.

A useful test: could this first sentence appear in anybody else's essay? If yes, it is not an opening, it is a warm-up. "My grandmother's kitchen smelled of cardamom" is closer to specific than "Family has always been important to me", but it is still a genre opening. "My grandmother kept the good scissors in a drawer nobody was allowed to open, including her" belongs to one essay only.

The opening does not need to be clever. Clever is where most rewriting goes wrong. It needs to be particular.

If you cannot start, write the middle

The blank page is usually not an opening problem, it is a not-knowing-what-the-essay-is problem, and no amount of staring at the first line solves that.

Write the part you can already see — the scene, the argument, the moment you keep returning to — and write it badly. The opening is far easier to find once the body exists, because by then you know what the essay is introducing. Almost every good opening is written last.

If you do not yet have a subject, the fastest route is not brainstorming topics. It is writing three hundred words about something small and recent, without deciding in advance what it means. Whatever you keep circling back to is the essay.

One more thing about the ending

Applicants who fix the opening frequently ruin the close, by arriving at a lesson. Failure taught me resilience. I learned the value of family. I realised success is a journey.

Endings that state the moral read as distrust of the reader — you have shown them something and then explained it. The stronger close usually returns to a concrete detail from earlier, or leaves a question genuinely open. At eighteen, unresolved is honest, and readers trust it far more than they trust neat.