Any college student has to face the necessity of writing essays. However, with any type of paper, many aspiring writers find themselves in a bind on the very first step of this task—deciding what to write about. Indeed, in many cases, instead of providing their students with a defined topic, professors often prefer to allow them to develop a free idea from scratch.

Although this approach seems more complex and challenging, choosing your own prompt is a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate your strong sides in writing while following the assignment requirements. We developed a number of prompts that would become a convenient inspiration for a student who wants to create their own topic or use them as they are.

Writing Prompts for College Students

Developing your essay prompts might be difficult for beginners, so we created a compilation of the most interesting and valuable prompts. You might use these ready ideas, or you can change and redevelop them to form a unique and original topic to impress your professors.

  1. Describe an essential aspect of your identity and how it influences your worldview.
  2. Reflect on an event that forced you to challenge your worldview and how it affected you.
  3. Tell your readers about a significant mistake or failure and the lessons you extracted from it.
  4. Describe any issue you want to deal with and discuss your ideas on a unique and effective solution.
  5. Recount your life goals, including career, personal, and learning aims, and how you plan to reach them.
  6. Share the talent or interest that plays a significant role in your motivation and life.
  7. Review an accomplishment that helped you to understand your motivation and goal in life.
  8. Describe a topic of interest that can fully capture your attention. How do you develop your knowledge and understanding of this subject area?
  9. Choose a quote from a famous person that describes and connects with you best and explain why exactly it is close to you.
  10. Describe the best advice you have ever received and how it influenced your decisions.
  11. Write about a particular activity or hobby that strongly influenced your life.
  12. If you had an opportunity to teach a class, what subject would you choose, and why?
  13. Reflect on a time when you had to protect your beliefs and defend your stance.
  14. What topics make you angry or disturbed, and what do you think about these feelings?
  15. What personal accomplishment makes you proud and satisfied?
  16. If you had to give a speech to your peers, what topic would you prefer to use and why?
  17. If you had an opportunity to talk to any living or dead person, who would you choose? Describe the reasoning behind your decision.
  18. What advice would you give to a younger student who only begins their education?
  19. Recount an experience of speaking up for and protecting another person.
  20. Choose a book you would recommend to your peers and explain your decision.
  21. Describe a person who made a significant positive impact on you and helped you to understand yourself.
  22. Choose a social, religious, or political law that is important to you and explain why it is relevant.
  23. If you could travel to any place in the world, where would you go and why?
  24. What invention or idea, in your opinion, brought humanity more harm than good?
  25. If you could change one event from your past, what would it be and why?

How to Develop a Perfect Essay Based on the Prompt

  • Properly choose your topic. An excellent idea would be choosing a prompt that resonates with you the most and describing an exciting life experience related to it. Try to provide a genuine and original opinion, and examples—a custom and unique essay would have much more impact than a generic one, even if the latter is written better than the former.
  • Follow the instructions closely. Remember that academic writing often has strict requirements that you should take into account. Thoroughly check the instructions, do appropriate research and ensure that your essay corresponds to them perfectly.
  • Use a high-quality example. Sometimes developing an excellent paper by yourself and properly structuring and formatting it seems a tricky task, especially if you’re a beginner in academic writing. Hence, search for a sample on the internet or and buy a cheap example from a custom essay writing service e.g. CustomWritings or similar companies. However, be careful and check the reviews before you become a customer of such a website to be sure that you will receive top-quality services.
  • Focus on your idea. It’s better to choose one topic and explore it thoroughly than bringing up a bunch of ideas, shallowly describing and abandoning them. Concentrate on the main idea of your paper and make sure that you elaborate on it in an expert and professional manner.

How to increase your creative writing skills

  • Read quality essays and articles

Having a good example before your eyes can really do wonders. If you’re constantly reading professionally written papers, you start to understand the meaning behind rules that regulate writing style and structuring. Furthermore, it helps you broaden your knowledge on various topics and provides information that can prove helpful later.

  • Practice regularly

Writing is a skill that can be developed through diligent work, and if you set yourself a small goal to write every day, soon you will notice the improvement in your abilities and confidence. Moreover, this approach is generally beneficial to your English skills, which might be especially relevant for students from other countries who come to the USA and UK.

  • Ask for outside help

Finally, don’t be shy to ask for assistance from a more experienced person, for example, a more accomplished student or a teacher. When you learn in the company of another writer, some fresh eyes might bring a persistent mistake in your writing to your attention or give a recommendation on improving your skills.

Conclusion

Prompts can be a valuable support for your writing, helping to spin your mind into work and provide new ideas. We combined some inspiring and creative prompts to assist you with choosing a topic for your future essay and provide some inspiration for your writing.

Furthermore, the prompts can be used for training and improving your writing skills—just pick one and start developing your new essay. You might also order a personalized example of a properly written paper from an online service to check if you’re doing it correctly. Just follow your instructions, concentrate on the main idea of your paper, and remember that practice makes perfect, so there’s nothing impossible if you’re dedicated enough.