Admission officers are speed-readers. You need to make them slow down. Your first sentence is the key. As a general rule, it should be the best sentence in your piece. How do you find it?
Follow Hemingway’s advice: “If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.” (Moveable Feast, a must-read if you like writing.)
Here’s an example:
Common: “An event that sparked a period of personal growth and new understanding for me was the first time I went to a bullfight with my cousins in Mexico.”
Nope. Watch what Hemingway does:
Compelling: “At the first bullfight I ever went to I expected to be horrified and perhaps sickened by what I had been told would happen to the horses.” (Death in the Afternoon)
Here’s another example: Common: “The most challenging event I’ve had to overcome happened one winter day when I was 12 and I encountered ice for the first time with my Father on a skiing trip.”
That’s not it. This is it:
Compelling : “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Márquez.)
Notice also: These greats both end their opening sentences on strong words–horses, ice–and cliffhangers. What happens to the horses? Who is the Colonel, why is he facing a firing squad, ice? You’ll start noticing this over-and-over in good writing. Of course, don’t force it, and it’s not a hard rule. It can come off try-hard. But try it out. See if it works for you.
–MCS
I tell my students that the goal is to keep the AO reading. It’s much easier to create an interesting opening sentence than it is to create a closing one. Students do need to write to their ability though. If they attempt to seem really sophisticated and they haven’t got the skill for that, the writing is going to sound artificial and forced.
Using your example above, a less skillful writer could still make this much more interesting.
“The most challenging event I’ve had to overcome happened one winter day when I was 12 and I encountered ice for the first time with my Father on a skiing trip.” The average writer could perhaps revise this to “I watched my father become smaller as my skis carried me backwards down the icy mountain.” Still worth reading, and doesn’t require a lot of sophisticated writing technique.
Sounds like we mostly agree. You’ve highlighted the same danger I noted: “Of course, don’t force it, and it’s not a hard rule. It can come off try-hard. But try it out. See if it works for you.”
But the main point of my advice is to open with your best sentence. Any student writing a college essay can do that. I don’t think there’s anything sophisticated about ending sentences on strong words. That’s just a good writing rule that students should strive for when making revisions.
You say “the goal is keep the AO reading.” I agree that’s one goal. And one excellent way to do that is by cutting any throat-clearing introductory lines, opening with your best sentence, and building in some suspense.
What are your opinions on beginning an essay ‘in medias res’? I’ve always been a fan of getting right to the meat of the story, then taking the time to develop the background/foundation.
Two years ago, S19 wrote his essay which started with, ‘They shuttered their doors permanently, almost without warning.’ Then he went on to develop the story about how much our local chapel (which was suddenly closed) meant to him and his upbringing and how important it was to the lives of our neighbors. I thought it was very impactful.
His English teacher read the essay and told him to develop the story first, then use that sentence after the reader understood how important the chapel was to him.
I disagreed. I felt that opening sentence was powerful and a decent hook. But in the end, his English teacher won the debate.
I’m with you. I think opening in the middle of the action is precisely what Hemingway is talking about above. You see that in great films too: the movie opens with someone whispering “Rosebud”; the Star Wars intro is rare.
And I love the sentence you mentioned: that’s a perfect way to make a reader slow down, build suspense, and ends with a strong word. I def. would have led with that. If students have to write a lot of essays, I think it’s good to mix it up and answer some with a direct, simple answer. But totally agree: it’s almost always more interesting and better to open in the action.
I hate the advice to “show don’t tell.” It’s 100% correct. But kids often struggle to understand what that cryptic, hackneyed, English-teacher-phrase means. I think you’re identifying one aspect of it: Don’t offer explanatory sentences about how your chapel closed down. Pick a specific moment and jump right into describing it.
I think the best way to teach “show don’t tell” is: prove you mean it. Don’t say (“tell”) “I love basketball.” Prove you love basketball (“show it”) by writing about it with specificity and command: “It started as a YMCA project for inventing something to do during winter. But his project became a billion-dollar industry. And one I spend most of my time working on. James Naismith created 13 random rules restricting the movement of a ball around a designed space . . .” You don’t need to tell me you love basketball. You just proved to me you do.
FWIW, my D20 and I disagreed about what the first sentence of his essay should be. He reorganized his initial draft and plucked a sentence from the middle to start. His essay, his choice, but I didn’t think it worked as well.
It ended up being a funny essay about all the silly reasons he thought he didn’t like the college and what he discovered when he dug a little deeper. We know it made an impression because he got a note about it when they sent a holiday card after his EA acceptance.
I thought it might be over the top, but it turned out his instincts were pretty good.