Essay Writing Prompts: Capturing Reader’s Interest

Writing an essay can be simple, but writing the kind of essay that makes people sit up and notice is slightly more difficult. For one, the writing has to be excellent, without errors and without the kind of writing that is too convoluted or too simple. A mix of sentence length, and use of extensive vocabulary, help make the writing worth reading. But another problem that is often faced by the student sitting down to write an essay is an interesting topic.

While some of the time topics are assigned, making life easier for everyone, sometimes topics are left up to the student, and in that case the whole wide world of topics is available to choose from. It can be very daunting and difficult to pick the right topic – one that is interesting to you, since you need to be able to concentrate enough to be able to write the whole essay – and also interesting to whoever is going to read it.

Since writing effective essays can be important for any level of education – during high school or college, for admissions processes or for passing courses – it is important to get the hang of it early on. One way to write an effective essay about an interesting topic is to use an essay prompt.

An essay prompt is basically a word, a sentence or just a series of ideas, which can trigger in the beginning of an essay. Anything that gives you an idea of what to write is an effective prompt, but in today’s age of immediacy and instant satisfaction, it is more important to have an effective and capturing beginning.

Obviously, since essays are written at different levels of education and there are different expectations from the author at those levels, prompts cannot be the same across the board. That’s why when you come across lists of formal essay writing prompts, they are often divided into groups, for instance high school essay writing prompts, college essay writing prompts, etc.

To conclude: using a prompt to write an essay is an easy way to write something that is relevant and interesting to both the author and the reader. But when using prompts, be careful to pick one that is according to the kind of level you are meant to be writing at.