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A good college application essay starts with an excellent introduction.

An excellent essay starts with an outstanding introduction.

An outstanding essay starts with no introduction.

How is that possible!!? We need a punch line that gets the AJ’s attention! How can you say that we don’t need an introduction?!

Yes! A punch line does grab AJ attention…as long as the rest of the college application essay content is as good as the punch line. Many students put a disproportional amount of energy into writing the introduction and the introduction is truly refreshing and exciting. That is why a good essay has an excellent introduction and an excellent essay has an outstanding introduction. Unfortunately, most students’ introduction punch lines become the best part of the whole essay. Everything is downhill from there!

The function of introduction is to lead the AJ into your story. Imagine the essay itself is a nice dinner. The introduction is the appetizer part of the dinner. The function of the appetizer is to get you to enjoy the main course. If the appetizer is too delicious or taste too strong, it will overtake the dinner’s experience.  If an appetizer that blends in with the meal perfectly, how great the dinner will be!

A punch line serves as a pattern interrupt for the AJ which could be very useful when he is in an “essay-reading-sleep”. However, most of the times when a student uses a punch line introduction, the punch line becomes an attention grabber just for the sake of attention grabbing. It doesn’t serve to smoothly deliver the real content, in another world, bring readers into your story. Therefore the intrinsic value of an introduction is lost. If your introduction doesn’t bring the reader into college application your story, your body paragraphs won’t ether.

An outstanding essay’s introduction blends perfectly with the story and they become “one”. There is no need to “introduce” the story. The introduction itself is so smooth that it serves as a perfect logic step not only grabbing the AJ’s attention but also bringing him deeply into the story. If the introduction becomes one with your story, the story can’t stand alone without it.

(If you have an introduction already, the easiest way to see if your introduction is ideal is to take it out of the essay, and see if the story is unchanged. If it is, your introduction is not doing an outstanding job.)

Now we are going to learn a technique to do that.

As you are reading this this text, you are most likely sitting. You can feel your weight on the chair, you sense the temperature of the room you are in college application essay how to write right now, and you can hear the noise outside. Before You were reading the last lines, did you notice all those things you were experiencing? The pressure of you sitting, the temperature, and the noise? Most likely no! Your senses were experiencing those feelings constantly yet you only noticed them when you read those “instructions”.

In hypnotherapy, when a person is “instructed” or “suggested” to pay attention to one of his sense, he would be consciously aware of that particular sense. What is more is that if the person is “instructed”/ “suggested” to feel a particular feeling, such as feeling the temperature is getting warm/cold, he would indeed feel it as if the temperature is physically raising/dropping. Therefore, the hypnotherapist can put the patient in an imaginary scenario by instructing them to imagine what the environment would look, smell, sound, feel, etc.

To take the AJ into the scenario of your story, you too, will use this technique. In our introduction, the quickest way to make the AJ feel she is actually “in” our story is to engage all her senses and make her feel that SHE is in the story.

Read the below paragraph.

My breath stops. I can feel the hair of my body going straight up. Time stops down as I sense a drop of sweat how to write a college applicaiton essay slowly going down my burning cheek. My right foot is pressing on the break as hard as I can. My hands are spinning the steering wheel so fast that I can hardly see the movement. My friend is sitting next to me is screaming on top of his lungs but I can’t hear a thing. A cold mist starts to spread from my chest through my whole body. I, for the first time in a long time, feel true fear as I am driving straight to a head-on collision.

This is an accident that actually happened to me. In the paragraph, I engaged 4 senses here, vision, hearing, temperature, and physical feeling. As you read it, you most likely imagine the scenario there. It sucks you right in college application essay. If you are still not sure whether you will be able to create your own masterpiece. Then you can always seek help from professionals in your field such as