The scholarship essay opening that works
February 7, 2023 · 2 min read
You get about two sentences before a tired reader decides how carefully to read. Spend them well.
Scholarship readers work through stacks of essays in a sitting. By essay twenty, they're skimming for a reason to keep reading closely, which means your opening does more work than any other part of the piece.
The openings that work are concrete and specific: a moment, an image, a line of dialogue. The ones that don't are abstract statements about the value of education, which every reader has seen several hundred times.
Try this test — delete your first paragraph entirely and read what's left. A surprising number of essays are stronger without the throat-clearing intro they started with.
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