I’ve fallen for them, and I’m sure many of you have, too. Those dopey “articles” online whose headlines I just can’t resist:
You’ll never believe what happened next!
Top Ten_______. Number 6 will blow your mind!
Best sports photos ever captured.
Those headlines are just hooks—false drama acting as a bait to lure otherwise uninterested readers. And not surprisingly, the articles themselves almost never live up to the hook hype.
College applicants may have heard that your essay needs a hook, something to grab the reader’s attention. That’s why so many essays include sentences like “As we hurtled toward the icy rapids, our paddles frantically churning in unison…” or, “In that moment, I realized that teamwork and friendship were far more important than winning.”
But you’re not writing click-bait here.
If an experience was dramatic, by all means, relay the drama. But if you’re injecting drama after the fact, you run the risk of moving away from good story-telling into something more akin to the online headline baits.
Yes, your college essay needs to be interesting—no reader will want to slog through six hundred words about why you love popcorn. And I love a pithy opening as much as any reader (one of my all-time favorite essays from a Collegewise student began, “I am a good loser. It is an art that I’ve perfected). Good writing means good story-telling, after all.
But the most important of the many differences between a college essay and the online click-bait is that you are not writing for an otherwise uninterested audience. You’re writing for willing readers who are invested in learning about you. You have their attention. You don’t need to pique their interest. You just need to satisfy it. And that’s a no-hook-necessary goal.