HOW TO BEGIN AN ESSAY
The beginning of your essay is all-important. If you write a good one, your reader will want to go on reading to see what you have to say. Write a bad one, and your reader will be your reader no longer! (A Writer's Companion, 219)
THE PURPOSE OF WRITING INTRODUCTIONS
 | It gets your reader’s attention. |
| It tells your reader what your main idea is (and how you will develop it). |
The part of your introduction that gets your reader’s attention is called the motivator.
The part that tells your reader what your main point is (and how you will develop it) is called the thesis statement.
EXAMPLE:
Do you realize that newly born children are not even aware that parts of their bodies belong to them? I learned this fascinating fact in my psychology course from a book that says a baby “lies on his back, kicking his heels and watching the little fists flying past his face. But only very slowly does he come to know that they are attached to him and he can control them” (Pulaski, 12). Children have a lot of learning to do before they can see the world—and themselves—through grown-up eyes. As children pass through this remarkable process of growing up, they often do some humorous things, especially in learning to speak, in discovering that all objects do not have human characteristics, and in trying to imitate others around them.
What is the motivator? The motivator is everything in the paragraph except the last sentence.
MOTIVATORS: A Few Examples
1. Begin by telling a story.
On October 30, 1995, Harry Eastlack arrived for a two-day symposium at the Wyndham Franklin Plaza Hotel, in Philadelphia. Forty-three families of people with fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, or FOP, were joining a high-powered assortment of orthopedic surgeons, molecular biologists, geneticists, and other doctors and scientists in hopes of making some sense of this puzzling disease. Harry's sister and her husband volunteered to entertain the children afflicted with FOP and their siblings while their parents attended professional sessions and swapped experiences. Harry himself played no active role. He had died in 1973. Yet his silent presence revealed the tragedy and the challenge of FOP more eloquently than any chart, slide, or clinical description ever could. [It is interesting that Harry attended a conference in 1995-- but he had been dead since 1973. The article goes on to tell how Harry left his body to the physicians who had treated him in hopes that research might save others from FOP.]
2. Describe a scene.
Every morning the Muslim call to prayer, an adenoidal chant whining from as many as five minarets in Urgüp, our small town in central Turkey, incited roosters and posses of roaming dogs to join the chorus. This curious cacophony was my wake-up call, buried as I was in a windowless hollow sculpted from a cliff of soft rock. For a breath of dawn I would bolt from bed around a stairwell to a balcony that looked out over a hillside pockmarked with cave dwellings and across a vast, dusty, valley of undulating vineyards planted in a tawny volcanic grit. There at eye level one hazy sunrise last September bobbed sixty, eventually a hundred, brilliantly colored hot-air balloons─ gaudy bubbles drifting above the Cappadocian landscape of walnut orchards and erosion-sculpted rock.
3. Use a provocative quotation.
"That Coke sign has its own phone number," Ed Hayman says. We're standing in Times Square at dusk like tourists, heads back, feet planted, watching a 42-foot animated Coca-Cola bottle go through its paces. High above the cab-filled junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, the bottle's giant cap slowly lifts up, a straw emerges and the bottle's contents seem to drain. Around it, an expanse of neon swirls and dances. The sign weighs 55 tons and incorporates 13,000 lightbulbs, 60 miles of fiber optics, miscellaneous robotic parts and a small weather station. And a phone. I ask Hayman, who works for New York's venerable Artkraft Strauss Sign Corporation, why anyone would want to call a billboard. "Mostly, we don't. It calls us." If a part of the sign overheats or gets stuck, he explains, a metallic computer voice will phone the signmaker's office and report, "I have Shut Down Sector Three," and give temperature readings and wind speeds, and also a sound check to boot. Artkraft, which built and maintains the sign, can't allow much down-time; for the privilege of having its name in lights here, Coca-Cola is paying more than a million dollars a year.
4. Begin with a simple, definite statement.
Once again the voice of the censor is heard in the land, and so are the contesting arguments of the civil libertarian, the artist, and the businessman who markets entertainment. It's an old fight with a new twist. The Supreme Court has struck down parts of the Communications Decency Act aimed at shielding young people from pornographic material on the Internet. Under threat of similar hostile legislation, the television industry has also been thrashing its way to a system of ratings (like those being used by moviemakers) to guide parents in deciding what to let the children watch. It's significant that while television has been coping with critics for some fifty years now, and movies for a hundred, it's the Internet that actually drew a federal censorship law.
5. Ask a question.
An African Eve is a seductive idea─ dark-skinned, strongly built, the primeval woman, mother of us all. But did she actually exist? Was there actually an evolutionary Garden of Eden in Africa where we all originated more than 150,000 years ago? [The writer may answer the question and proceed to the rest of the article, or the writer may leave the question to be puzzled over until later in the essay. The question does not have to be the first sentence of the essay, but it does have to come quickly.]
6. Use contrast.
Begin by stating an opinion that the main idea of your paper opposes and then make a transition to your thesis statement.
| What the opposition says |
| Transition |
| What you say |
Some people think that smoking makes them appear sophisticated and mysterious, perhaps even seductive. They become Humphrey Bogart in Cassablanca or Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. Those people, however, are wrong. As far as I am concerned, smoking is really a disgusting habit—messy, irritating to others, and ever harmful to nonsmokers.
What is the transition statement? “Those people, however, are wrong.”
THESIS STATEMENTS: Placement is Important
Placing the thesis statement as the last sentence of your paragraph helps provide clarity and emphasis. Think of your introduction paragraph as a funnel—
|
Motivator consisting of general statements |
|
Getting the attention of your reader |
|
Relevant to the main idea of your essay |
EXAMPLE 1:
The environment is the world around us, and everyone agrees it needs a cleaning. Big corporations gobble up the countryside and disgorge what is left into the breeze and streams. Big trucks rumble by, trailing their fumes. A jet roars into the air, and its soot drifts over the trees. Everyone calls for massive action and then tosses away a cigarette or gum wrapper. The world around us is also a sidewalk, a lawn, a restaurant, a hallway, or a school courtyard. Cleaning the environment can begin by reaching for the scrap of paper at your feet.
EXAMPLE 2:
When many people hear the word Africa, they picture steaming jungles and gorillas. Hollywood films have shrunk the public image of this immense, varied continent into a small segment of its actual diversity. To have a more accurate picture of the whole continent, however, one should remember that there are, roughly, three Africas, each with its distinct climate and terrain and with a style of life suited to the environment. The continent can be divided into the northern desert areas, the southeastern grasslands, and the tropical jungles to the southwest. (http://www.taftcollege.edu/newTC/Academic/LiberalArts/OWL/INTRO.HTML)