Essay Writing for Neurodivergent Students: Selecting a Topic
If you’re reading this, then you’re probably either neurodivergent yourself, or looking to support a neurodivergent student who struggles with writing essays. In this series, I will break down essay writing into a clear, step-by-step guide that focuses on accommodating neurodivergence. Whether you’re Autistic or ADHD (or both!), I hope you’ll find the strategies and tips here helpful. I’ve found them helpful for my own academic writing, as well as supportive to neurodivergent students I’ve worked with.
There are many different types of essays, but this series will focus on academic essays assigned in school. Specifically, this post will cover the first step in writing an essay: selecting a topic.
But first, let’s explore what makes essays so challenging, particularly for neurodivergent students.
Why Is Writing Essays So Hard?
Maybe you don’t find essays difficult to write, and if so, that’s awesome! Feel free to ignore the rest of this post, and move on with your happy life, filled with an abundance of completed essays. However, many students struggle with writing essays. It’s a big assignment, often with rather vague instructions. Writing an essay requires a significant time investment, usually (and often ideally) spread out over several days.
Even neurotypical students often find essays challenging. Add in the executive dysfunction, need for clear instructions, and difficulty with attention regulation that many neurodivergent students experience, and it’s no wonder so many neurodivergent students find essays daunting.
Open-Ended Questions and Neurodivergence
In particular, many neurodivergent people struggle with open-ended questions. And unfortunately, the way essays are presented in school often turns the whole assignment into a giant, massively open-ended question. You read a book, and then you’re expected to write several pages of insightful commentary about it.
That’s a pretty daunting task, especially if your flavor of neurodivergence makes open-ended questions challenging. For some people, even a seemingly straightforward question such as “tell me about yourself” can cause a full freeze, leading them to stare blankly while struggling to recall a single detail of their own life (this happens to me embarrassingly often). So, writing several pages about a broad topic or entire book (which may or may not be of interest to the student) is understandably challenging for many students.
From Open-Ended Question to Clear Steps
The purpose of this series is to break that open-ended assignment of “write an essay” into some more manageable steps. I didn’t really cement these steps until grad school, where essays were the primary type of assignment and 11 pages was considered “short.” Out of necessity, I developed a system that allowed me to write lengthy graduate-level essays regularly, while still maintaining my sanity and even having some free time left over.
Once I realized there was a clear system, writing essays became much less daunting. Two 14-page essays due next week? Sure, no problem. Turns out, I was making the whole thing way more complicated than it needed to be.
If you’re currently stressed out by essays, I hope having a clear guide will help ease that stress. Although I only figured it out in grad school, this approach is useful at any level of schooling. Whether you’re in middle school, high school, or college, this step-by-step process will give you a clear path from blank page to fully formed essay.
A Quick Disclaimer
Although my approach works for me, and has helped many of my students, remember that your own experience is the ultimate deciding factor on whether something is helpful. Different things will work for different people. So if you try something and it isn’t helpful, that’s okay! Unless you get very lucky, finding what works means first trying a lot of things that don’t work. Treat any “failures” as a learning opportunity, embrace your new token of wisdom, and go try something else.
You may also find that some my suggestions directly contradict each other. That’s actually intentional, because different people might find that opposite things work for them. Even the same person might find a particular strategy helpful on one day, only for it to be unhelpful the next! So, try to be open-minded in experimenting with new things.
As always, take what works for you and leave the rest.
Preparing To Select An Essay Topic
Now that we’ve covered a bit of why essays are so difficult and what to expect from this series, let’s move on to the first step in writing an essay: selecting a topic.
If You’ve Already Chosen a Topic
Awesome, great job! If you’ve already chosen a topic, and you feel at least marginally confident that you’ll have a few things to say about it, feel free to skip the rest of this post and move on to outlining. Despite the rather lengthy remainder of this post, there’s really no need to overcomplicate it. If you’re able to just pick something and run with it, absolutely do that. If you start outlining and realize the topic isn’t working out, you can always come back and pick a new one.
The rest of this post is for people who struggle to come up with any topic at all, or who find topic selection to be problematically open-ended, leading to decision paralysis.
This decision paralysis is certainly something I struggle with. More than once, I’ve found myself stuck at the grocery store, trying to decide between two bags of carrots. Not different sizes or brands–literally identical bags of carrots. And yet, it would often take me minutes to just pick one already, even knowing that this was among the least important decisions of my life.
So, if you find yourself in decision paralysis when choosing an essay topic, I get it. The good news is, much like my identical bags of carrots, when it comes to selecting an essay topic…
It Doesn’t Really Matter What You Choose
I know choosing an essay topic can feel like a big decision. After all, you’ll likely spend several hours writing about it. However, unless this is a PhD thesis you’ll be working on for several years, there’s really no need to stress yourself out trying to pick the perfect topic.
You may want to write something brilliant and insightful, and that’s a great goal. However, if chasing perfection is preventing you from even getting started, you’re going to end up with no essay at all. And, in terms of the grade you’ll get, turning in even a deeply mediocre essay is vastly superior to turning in nothing. In fact, your essay could be downright bad, and it would still be better than nothing. Even some thoughts scribbled on a napkin at least has a chance of getting you a few points.
Now, I’m not saying you should give up and just write a few bullet points instead of a proper essay. But, swinging too far the other way and becoming fixated on perfection can be just as damaging. Possibly even more damaging, if you consider the psychological impact.
Difficult as it can be, try to keep this decision in perspective. In the grand scheme of things, it’s just one essay in one class. In a few years, you might not even remember writing it. So, with that in mind, let’s move on to actually picking a topic.
How to Brainstorm Essay Ideas
Before you can pick an essay topic, you first need to have a list of topics to choose from. In many cases, your teacher will provide a list of suggested topics. If so, you’re all done with this step! If not, there are several ways to generate ideas.
Ask Your Teacher
Perhaps the easiest approach is to simply ask your teacher. Arrange to meet with them, explain that you’re struggling to decide what to write about, and ask if they have a few general topic ideas you could consider. Most teachers will be more than happy to give suggestions.
If for some reason your teacher refuses, ask them what method they would recommend for coming up with a topic. See if they would be willing to walk through that process together. If not, try to get as much detail as you can, so hopefully you’ll be able to follow their suggestion on your own. If for whatever reason you find their instructions unhelpful, that’s okay. Move on to one of the ideas below instead.
Class Discussions
If you have any notes from previous class discussions, these could give you some ideas for potential topics. Alternately, if you can remember any general topics that were discussed in class, those also might be good essay topics.
Consult Your Classmates
Obviously you wouldn’t want to write the whole essay together (assuming this is an individual assignment). However, it wouldn’t be out of line to brainstorm potential essay topics with classmates. In fact, doing so might help your classmates get started on their essays too. They might have ideas you didn’t think of, and vice versa. As long as you’re not writing a whole outline together (and then both using the same outline), you shouldn’t run into any problems with the essays ending up too similar.
Check the Front/Back of the Book
Sometimes at the beginning or end of a novel, there will be a list of discussion questions. If your book has this, great news: you just found a list of essay prompts.
Relate to Your Special Interests
If possible, try to find a connection between the source material from class and one of your special interests. This won’t always be possible, but if you’re able to come up with something, it’s likely to be an excellent topic for you. Writing about something you’re actually interested in will make the whole process much easier.
Look for Ideas Online
I put this one near the end, partly because some people might frown upon it, but more importantly because it may or may not work. For more well-known books and subjects, looking up something like “essay topics for <title> by <author>” will likely give you a solid list to get started. However, for more obscure works, you may not find anything all.
Large Societal Issues
If you’re still feeling stumped, large societal issues can be a handy fallback that can easily relate to many academic topics. For example, almost any work of fiction can somehow be interpreted as a metaphor for racism, class divides, war, disability, or gender issues. This was my go-to strategy for tests with a timed essay portion. Despite not knowing the prompt in advance, I knew that I could virtually always find a racism metaphor somewhere in there. So, if there’s a societal issue that you know a bit about, you can probably find a way to connect it to the source material from your class.
How to Select an Essay Topic
So, you have a list of potential topics. How do you pick one? Good news, this is actually the most straightforward part of the process. Just follow the steps below.
1. Pick the most interesting topic
If there’s a topic that you find the most interesting, go ahead and pick that one. Or, create a shortlist of the topics you find the most interesting. If none of them are interesting, that’s okay. Go ahead to the next step.
2. Pick the easiest topic
Looking at your list (or shortlist from the previous step), do any of the topics seem like they would be easy to write about? This might be the one you understand the best, or maybe you have a lot of opinions about it, or for whatever reason think it would be the easiest to write about. Not sure which one would be easiest? No problem! Move on to the next step.
3. Pick one at random
Close your eyes, point at the list, open your eyes. There’s your topic. Or, use a random number generator. Or, write them all down on cards and draw one at random. Or, ask a friend or family member to pick one. Whatever method you use to randomize the choice, the important thing is choosing something.
If, while you were picking one at random, you realized you were secretly hoping for a different one, pick that one instead.
Congratulations, you’ve chosen a topic!
Conclusion
Writing essays can be challenging for any student. However, neurodivergent students often find essays particularly challenging due to difficulties with organization, executive functioning, and open-ended questions. In this series, I will provide a step-by-step guide from blank page to fully-formed essay. Hopefully, this guide will help demystify and ease the executive function burden of essay writing.
This post covers the first step of writing an essay: selecting a topic. To choose a topic, you first need to brainstorm potential topic ideas. To generate ideas, try looking at the assignment, talking to your teacher or classmates, looking in the front or back of the book, searching online, and relating to your special interests or large societal issues. Once you have a list of potential topics, you can select one based on your interest in the topic, how easy you think it would be to write about, or even randomly.