How to Ace Your First College Essay, Part 1
This article will address developing the idea and beginning to write the paper.
By Ceanna Hayes Daniels — October 4, 2023
Many freshmen feel apprehensive about their first writing assignments in college. Despite their desire to succeed, they have limited experience writing at a university level or for a university audience. As a result, they may not know what strategies to use to complete the project, or even where to start.
If you find yourself overwhelmed by your first writing assignment, take a moment to break the process down. There are a few, concrete steps to writing a paper (or any other writing assignment, for that matter): developing the idea you'll write about, writing your draft(s), editing to make your argument coherent ("content edits"), and editing to make the draft both compelling and grammatically correct ("line edits"). Knowing a few simple tricks for each of these steps will help to dispel anxiety as you start your first college essay, and will empower you to confidently tackle every writing assignment that follows.
This article will address developing the idea and beginning to write the paper — check out part two for tips on editing!
Developing the Idea
Read the Syllabus Carefully.
Most professors have specific requirements for their papers, especially during first-year courses. Make sure you know the type of assignment you're writing and the required word count or page count before you begin developing the idea — there's nothing more frustrating than realizing a paper was meant to be a five-page analysis, not a three-page summary, after you've already put in the work to plan the entire draft. In addition, be sure to know what research you'll need to do for the paper — if you have to cite a certain number of primary or secondary sources to meet the syllabus's requirements, you'll need to schedule enough time to complete that research, reflect on it, and integrate your findings into the paper.Start with a "Brain Dump." Yes, you should prewrite.
When you begin thinking about your paper, you might be tempted to embrace the first idea you have to maximize the time you can spend writing and editing it. However, pressuring yourself to come up with a great idea on your first attempt can stifle your creativity, cause unnecessary anxiety, and even cause you to discard better ideas for the paper simply because they came to you a few hours later. Rather than limiting yourself like this, start out your essay-writing process with a "brain dump." Write down anything and everything that occurs to you on a loose piece of paper or a whiteboard, then, when you've finished, take a step back and look for connections and questions to base your first draft on.Compile a Quote Bank.
As you begin your research, compile the quotes that seem most valuable to your argument in one central location, like a Word document. While it can be tempting to skip this step to decrease your up-front workload, you'll thank yourself for doing it when you don't have to rifle through your bookmarks and reading assignments hunting for that one article where you saw that one quote that one time right before the deadline. (Bonus points if you take the time to save the full citation of each source alongside the quotes you collect to simplify assembling your bibliography and spare you from any panicked last-minute trips to the library.)Writing Your Draft(s)
Let Your First Draft Be Stream-of-Consciousness.
We all know the anxiety that comes from staring at an empty Word document with no idea of how to start writing. To spare yourself from that anxiety, let your first draft be stream-of-consciousness. Don't focus on getting it "right" yet — just let yourself ramble through your ideas for a bit without the pressure to make them a formal essay. You might try talking into your phone for an audio recording, hand-writing potential paragraphs in colorful ink on loose paper, or any other method that will create some distance between this draft and your final essay. (If you strongly prefer typing, try using a "fun" font that's different from the one you'll use when printing your paper to create a similar effect-just remember to change it to Times New Roman before you hit print.) This trick not only decreases the pressure you feel starting the project, but also tends to make you more creative. Plus, it means that you'll have an outline or complete draft in hand when you do head to your computer — no more blank screen paralysis!Rethink Structure.
Although five-paragraphs essays are common in high school, many writing assignments in college require a different approach. Try to distance yourself from the idea that a "good paper" is one with an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion summarizing what you already said in the paper. In college, you can try different structures and different approaches to suit the content of your argument. You might try including questions and counterarguments, or starting with a summary before moving into reflection. You might use your conclusion paragraph to build something new rather than just restate, by connecting your paper to a larger topic or theme, or by using it to pose a new question about the field. Although the familiar five-paragraph structure will sometimes suit the job at hand, you don't need to exclusively rely on that structure anymore.Use Outlines to Your Advantage.
If you're stumped on how to turn a stream-of-consciousness draft into an actual paper, try building your argument through a series of strategic outlines. Start out with a bare-bones outline of your paper, with just the topics of each paragraph listed. In the next version of the outline, use a few more details to turn the list of topics into a list of the points you'll make in each paragraph. From there, tweak the wording to change your points into topic sentences. (Through this process, a point on your outline might transform from the broad category "madness in Hamlet", to a more specific idea like "Hamlet isn't mad, but he pretends to be", then ultimately to a sentence arguing how a particular scene "suggests that Hamlet's madness is an act.") Next, flesh out the connections between each point so you can determine the best order for your points to follow. Continue to adapt the outline in stages like this, adding more and more details by adding sub-points and additional arguments below your main headings, until you've got a multiple page "outline" that's basically a rough draft with weird formatting. At this point, adapting the document into regular paragraphs will be easy.Embrace Rough Drafts.
Writing rough drafts is a good strategy for a number of reasons, Not only does it reduce the pressure you feel writing any one draft, but it also creates built-in time to review your work, which can help you to notice and address mistakes, unstated assumptions, potential counterarguments, and more before you turn in your assignment.Despite the benefits of writing rough drafts, some people struggle with the idea. If you generally avoided writing rough drafts during high school, set aside some time now to analyze why. Did your after-school job leave you with no energy to write, or was your calendar overbooked with extracurriculars? These are things you can fix in college — try scheduling yourself intentional free evenings every week to make time for lengthy assignments (and for intentional rest between projects). If you notice a more emotional or psychological reason for struggling with rough drafts — perhaps you struggle with perfectionism, or perhaps you have anxiety — then consider talking to a friend or a counselor about that underlying reason so you can get support and resources.
Remember, the Worst Draft Is the One You Don't Write.
If at this point in the essay-writing process, you find yourself stressing about getting the phrasing exactly right, then it's time to take a step back. Polishing up the specific wording of your paper will come later, during the line edits portion of the project - the only thing you need to do now is get ideas onto the page to create a starting point for your project. Any draft will put you miles ahead of where you were before, so give yourself permission to write a "bad" draft. You might be surprised with how valuable that first step is.
Ceanna Hayes Daniels
Ceanna Hayes Daniels is freelance writer and editor. In 2022, she graduated Hillsdale College summa cum laude with a degree in politics. In her free time, she continues to enjoy studying philosophy, political theory, and literature. She and her husband live in Michigan, where the two enjoy perusing bookstores together for new books and old records.
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