Once you have developed your thesis statement, broken down your main points and started your note cards, and completed your final outline, you are ready to compose a rough THESIS PARAGRAPH. This is the introductory paragraph of your research paper.
The best introductions follow this simple structure:
1) hook
2) explanation of issue
3) thesis (controlling idea)
- Hook: The opening part should begin with some kind of details, examples, quotes, statistics(if they are interesting), or descriptions. For example, for a paper on teen crime you might begin with one or more anecdotes (short, true stories that prove a point) about a particular teen or group of teens involved in some kind of criminal activity. Or you might begin with a series of facts about teen crime, perhaps including startling statistics. Most topics have loads of possibilities for anecdotes or other details for beginning. This section can be from a few sentences to perhaps as many as 200 words, depending on the length of the paper. The purpose here is to draw the reader into your paper.
- The second part of any introduction for a paper is the explanation of the issue. Here you explain what the issue is all about in general terms. By doing this you also explain what the limits of the paper are. [One way to do this is to rephrase the main sections of your working outline, add to them, and connect them with transition words!]
- The last part of the introduction is the formal thesis statement. This sentence is what your introduction has been leading up to.
REMEMBER: If you use any research in your thesis paragraph, you MUST cite it using parenthetical citations! An explanation of how to use parenthetical citations is found later in this manual.