Why You Shouldn’t Write Your College Essay From the Beginning

The rule to start at the beginning comes from quill and ink days. When you couldn’t easily move things around, you wrote in order because you had no choice. That constraint doesn’t exist anymore.

You’ve had cut and paste your whole life.

So write whatever part comes easiest: the detail you keep thinking about, the sentence that’s already in your head, the ending you somehow already know. Get that down first. Then build around it.

College admissions essays aren’t five-paragraph essays. There’s no thesis statement that locks in what comes next. The structure is yours to figure out — and you can figure it out after you’ve already written something.

Order is a technology problem that got turned into a writing rule. You don’t have to follow it.