Improve Each Essay by Deleting These Paragraphs
“In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ” This is a great start if you are writing a biography of the Messiah. Not so good for a college admission essay, or for a Medium post on the joys of having three children, or for an opinion column in a company newsletter. When you write your essay, you can start with a few warm-up paragraphs. But don’t forget to delete them.
As memoirist / essayist / writer / editor Roxanne Gay recently tweeted, many writers begin their articles too broadly:
Correct your introduction
Gay continues his thread with other essay writing tips, but for now, let’s try a specific tactic to clean up any essay: delete the first paragraph and possibly the last three.
Sometimes you waste your first paragraph trying to justify the existence of your piece. If a thing is good, it justifies its existence. Kill it.
Sometimes the first paragraph is where you try to contextualize your particular topic. In this case, you can leave it, but move it down a few paragraphs. Start with a specific subject and then return to a general one. I’ve made this a habit in the last year or two in my own Lifehacker posts.
Sometimes you do the opposite: tell a personal anecdote as an introduction to a broader topic. You should probably move this introduction down as well. If doing so makes your personal story unscathed, delete it.
Sometimes you joke in the first paragraph. At least I am. Add some jokes to the rest of the snippet – you now have a slightly hilarious snippet! – or kill them all. They are nice people that everyone tells you to kill. Which, by the way, is a useless metaphor. Editing isn’t infanticide, it’s birth control.
Correct your conclusion
You can probably delete the last paragraph as well. Hell, you can probably delete the last three.
If your last lines don’t add new information, trim them. Better to finish right away than ruin your work, like Bart Simpson ‘s Libya – Land of Contrasts .
If your last lines significantly expand the scope of your essay, shorten them. The awkwardly grand conclusion is a good sign: you are building up all that racing car dynamics, you are circling the corners, shrinking the line. But you need to put on the brake before driving off the cliff.
In the last few paragraphs, I’ve thrown a few Lifehacker posts off the cliff. I give some specific advice, state it, bring my point of view to the end, give the necessary warnings, and then try to turn this specific advice into a life mantra. My essay on bad coffee is good, but I shouldn’t have extended the lesson to include “buy shitty clothes” and “buy crappy phone.” This is beyond the scope of this article! This weakens my point of view. If I had another chance, I would shorten this paragraph. Go and do the same.