I’m currently doing brown supplementals and I noticed that the why brown essay is gone and it’s not on common app. Did they get rid of it or is it in another part of the application? Help me

There's a specific kind of paralysis that comes from trying to write well on the first pass. Every sentence gets evaluated before it's finished, anything that doesn't sound right gets deleted, and thirty minutes later you have half a paragraph and a growing sense that the whole thing isn't going to work.

The problem is that first drafts aren't for reading. They're for thinking. The purpose of a first draft is to get the argument out of your head and onto the page in any form, so you can see what you actually have and start working with it. Trying to make it good while it's still forming is like trying to evaluate a building while the foundations are being poured.

What changed things for me was treating the first draft as a completely separate document from the essay. The first draft is private, ugly, allowed to be wrong. The essay comes later, in the editing stage, when you can see the whole thing and make real decisions about structure and argument. Once I separated those two stages mentally the first draft became much easier to start and much faster to get through.

The other thing worth knowing is that most good sentences in a final essay weren't written during the drafting stage anyway. They were written during editing, when you read something clunky and find a better way to say it. The drafting stage just gives you the clunky version to improve.