How would I start off an essay?Answered
I was writing an essay about my struggle with living in the past or the future, But I don't know how to structure and I also don't know how to stop it from being cliche. How could I start the essay and how could I elaborate on my struggle and my fear of the future? How could I talk about how it affected me academically and how could I talk about how I recovered from the setback?
Thank you
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2 answers
Hi @Incognito!
The topic you are aiming to write about sounds very interesting! I suggest you reflect on a time that you actually felt fearful of the future and see if you can use that to draw the reader in at the beginning of the essay. Any sort of anecdote will help get their attention. Then, dive into how dwelling on the past and fearfulness of the future seeped into other aspects of your life and affected your academics. Provide enough context so the reader understands what you were feeling and how it affected you. The focus of the essay, however, should be how you overcame these feelings and learned to spend more time focusing on and valuing the present.
Like @Kaitlyn5394 said, just start brainstorming on a sheet of paper or Word doc and play around with different anecdotes you can mention. You might want to write a couple of different iterations and see which one ends up being the strongest. Also, I highly recommend using our Peer Essay Review service to get unbiased feedback. You can also check out our Live Essay Reviews if you want some more personalized advice - Robert is doing one tomorrow if you want some preliminary feedback on a draft (livestream linked here: https://www.collegevine.com/livestreams/4329/nye-live-essay-review-with-robert)
Hope that helps!
Hi!
The best advice I can give you would be to just start writing and "brain dump" all of your thoughts on the topic you're writing about. Get all of it out on paper. From here, you can begin to see how it sounds and edit what you've written to form your own original thoughts to avoid cliches. The College Vine peer essay reviewer is also super great for this. I've submitted some really, really rough first drafts that I knew were bad, but wasn't sure what to do with. Those reviews allowed me to get my bearings and turn those rough thoughts into a really good paper. Hope this helps, good luck! :)
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