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The Introduction
The introduction of your essay, usually one paragraph and rarely more than two, introduces your subject, creates interest, and often states your thesis.
You can introduce an essay and engage your readers’ interest in a number of ways. Here are several options for beginning an essay (in each paragraph, the thesis statement is underlined):
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1. You can begin with background information. This approach works well when you know the audience is already interested in your topic and you can come directly to the point. This strategy is especially useful for exams, where there is no need (or time) for subtlety.
With inflation low, many companies have understandably lowered prices, and the oil industry should be no exception. Consequently, homeowners have begun wondering whether the high price of home heating oil is justified given the economic climate. It makes sense, therefore, for us to start examining the pricing policies of the major American oil companies. (economics essay)
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2. You can introduce an essay with your own original definition of a relevant term or concept. This technique is especially useful for research papers, or exams, where the meaning of a specific term is crucial.
Democracy is a form of government in which power is given to and exercised by the people. This may be true in theory, but some recent elections have raised concerns about the future of democracy. Extensive voting-machine irregularities and “ghost voting” have jeopardized people’s faith in the democratic process. (political science exam)
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3. You can begin your essay with an anecdote or story that leads readers to your thesis.
Three years ago I went with my grandparents to my first auction. They live in a small town outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where it is common for relatives to auction off the contents of a home when someone moves or dies. As I walked through the crowd, I smelled the funnel cakes in the food trucks, heard the hypnotic chanting of the auctioneer, and sensed the excitement of the crowd. Two hours later, I walked off with an old trunk that I had bought for thirty dollars and a passion for auctions that I still have today. (composition essay)
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4. You can begin with a question.
What was it like to live through the Holocaust? Elie Wiesel, in One Generation After, answers this question by presenting a series of accounts about ordinary people who found themselves imprisoned in Nazi death camps. As he does so, he challenges some of the assumptions we have about those who survived the Holocaust. (sociology book report)
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5. You can begin with a quotation. If it arouses interest, it can encourage your audience to read further.
“The rich are different.” F. Scott Fitzgerald said this more than seventy years ago. Apparently, they still are. As an examination of the tax code shows, the wealthy receive many more benefits than the middle class or the poor do. (accounting paper)
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6. You can begin with a surprising statement. An unexpected statement catches readers’ attention and makes them want to read more.
Believe it or not, most people who live in the suburbs are not white and rich. My family, for example, fits into neither of these categories. Ten years ago, my family and I came to the United States from Pakistan. My parents were poor then, and by some standards, they are still poor even though they both work two jobs. Still, they eventually saved enough to buy a small house in the suburbs of Chicago. Throughout the country, there are many suburban families like mine who are working hard to make ends meet so that their children can get a good education and go to college. (composition essay)
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7. You can begin with a contradiction. You can open your essay with an idea that most people believe is true and then get readers’ attention by showing that it is inaccurate or ill advised.
Many people think that after the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, the colonists defeated the British army in battle after battle. This commonly held belief is incorrect. The truth is that the colonial army lost most of its battles. The British were defeated not because the colonial army was stronger, but because George Washington refused to be lured into a costly winner-take-all battle and because the British government lost interest in pursuing an expensive war three thousand miles from home. (History take-home exam)
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8. You can begin with a fact or statistic.
According to a recent government study, recipients of Medicare will spend billions of dollars on drugs over the next ten years. This is a very large amount of money, and it illustrates why lawmakers must do more to help older Americans with the cost of medications. Although the current legislation is an important first step, more must be done to help the elderly afford the drugs they need. (public policy essay)
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No matter which strategy you select, your introduction should be consistent in tone with the rest of your essay. If it is not, it can misrepresent your intentions and even damage your credibility. (For this reason, it is a good idea not to writ e your introduction until after you have finished the rest of your rough draft.) A technical report, for instance, should have an introduction that reflects the formality and objectivity the occasion requires. The introduction to an autobiographical essay, however, should have a more informal, subjective tone.
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WHAT NOT TO DO IN AN INTRODUCTION
· Don’t apologize. Never use phrases such as, “in my opinion” or “I may not be an expert, but…” By doing so, you suggest that you don’t really know your subject.
· Be careful using a dictionary definition. Avoid beginning an essay with phrases like, “According to Webster’s Dictionary….” This type of introduction is overused and trite. If you want to use a definition, develop your own or make sure it will surprise the reader.
· Don’t announce what you intend to do. Don’t begin with phrases such as, “In this paper I will…” or “The purpose of this essay is to…” Use your introduction to create interest in your topic, and let readers discover your intention when they get to your thesis statement.
· Don’t wander. Your introduction should draw readers into your essay as soon as possible. Avoid irrelevant comments or annoying digressions that will distract readers and make them want to stop reading.
from Patterns for College Writing by Kirszner & Mandell
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Are you an Intro Expert?
Here are a few more strategies
that might give you more ideas...
1. State your thesis briefly and directly (but avoid making a bald announcement, such as "This essay is about . . .").
It is time, at last, to speak the truth about Thanksgiving, and the truth is this. Thanksgiving is really not such a terrific holiday. . . .
(Michael J. Arlen, "Ode to Thanksgiving." The Camera Age: Essays on Television. Penguin, 1982)
2. State an interesting fact about your subject.
The peregrine falcon was brought back from the brink of extinction by a ban on DDT, but also by a peregrine falcon mating hat invented by an ornithologist at Cornell University. If you cannot buy this, Google it. Female falcons had grown dangerously scarce. A few wistful males nevertheless maintained a sort of sexual loitering ground. The hat was imagined, constructed, and then forthrightly worn by the ornithologist as he patrolled this loitering ground, singing, Chee-up! Chee-up! and bowing like an overpolite Japanese Buddhist trying to tell somebody goodbye. . . . (David James Duncan, "Cherish This Ecstasy." The Sun, July 2008)
3. Present your thesis as a recent discovery or revelation.
I've finally figured out the difference between neat people and sloppy people. The distinction is, as always, moral. Neat people are lazier and meaner than sloppy people.
(Suzanne Britt Jordan, "Neat People vs. Sloppy People." Show and Tell. Morning Owl Press, 1983)
4. Briefly describe the place that serves as the primary setting of your essay.
It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two. (George Orwell, "A Hanging," 1931)
5. Recount an incident that dramatizes your subject.
One October afternoon three years ago while I was visiting my parents, my mother made a request I dreaded and longed to fulfill. She had just poured me a cup of Earl Grey from her Japanese iron teapot, shaped like a little pumpkin; outside, two cardinals splashed in the birdbath in the weak Connecticut sunlight. Her white hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, and her voice was low. “Please help me get Jeff’s pacemaker turned off,” she said, using my father’s first name. I nodded, and my heart knocked.
(Katy Butler, "What Broke My Father's Heart." The New York Times Magazine, June 18, 2010)
6. Use the narrative strategy of delay: put off identifying your subject just long enough to pique your readers' interest without frustrating them.
They woof. Though I have photographed them before, I have never heard them speak, for they are mostly silent birds. Lacking a syrinx, the avian equivalent of the human larynx, they are incapable of song. According to field guides the only sounds they make are grunts and hisses, though the Hawk Conservancy in the United Kingdom reports that adults may utter a croaking coo and that young black vultures, when annoyed, emit a kind of immature snarl. . . .
(Lee Zacharias, "Buzzards." Southern Humanities Review, 2007)
7. Using the historical present tense, relate an incident from the past as if it were happening now.
Ben and I are sitting side by side in the very back of his mother’s station wagon. We face glowing white headlights of cars following us, our sneakers pressed against the back hatch door. This is our joy--his and mine--to sit turned away from our moms and dads in this place that feels like a secret, as though they are not even in the car with us. They have just taken us out to dinner, and now we are driving home. Years from this evening, I won’t actually be sure that this boy sitting beside me is named Ben. But that doesn’t matter tonight. What I know for certain right now is that I love him, and I need to tell him this fact before we return to our separate houses, next door to each other. We are both five.
(Ryan Van Meter, "First." The Gettysburg Review, Winter 2008)
8. Briefly describe a process that leads into your subject.
I like to take my time when I pronounce someone dead. The bare-minimum requirement is one minute with a stethoscope pressed to someone’s chest, listening for a sound that is not there; with my fingers bearing down on the side of someone’s neck, feeling for an absent pulse; with a flashlight beamed into someone’s fixed and dilated pupils, waiting for the constriction that will not come. If I’m in a hurry, I can do all of these in sixty seconds, but when I have the time, I like to take a minute with each task.
(Jane Churchon, "The Dead Book." The Sun, February 2009)
9. Reveal a secret about yourself or make a candid observation about your subject.
I spy on my patients. Ought not a doctor to observe his patients by any means and from any stance, that he might the more fully assemble evidence? So I stand in doorways of hospital rooms and gaze. Oh, it is not all that furtive an act. Those in bed need only look up to discover me. But they never do.
(Richard Selzer, "The Discus Thrower." Confessions of a Knife. Simon & Schuster, 1979)
10. Open with a riddle, joke, or humorous quotation, and show how it reveals something about your subject.
Q: What did Eve say to Adam on being expelled from the Garden of Eden?
A: "I think we're in a time of transition."
The irony of this joke is not lost as we begin a new century and anxieties about social change seem rife. The implication of this message, covering the first of many periods of transition, is that change is normal; there is, in fact, no era or society in which change is not a permanent feature of the social landscape. . . .
(Betty G. Farrell, Family: The Making of an Idea, an Institution, and a Controversy in American Culture. Westview Press, 1999)
11. Offer a contrast between past and present that leads to your thesis.
As a child, I was made to look out the window of a moving car and appreciate the beautiful scenery, with the result that now I don't care much for nature. I prefer parks, ones with radios going chuckawaka chuckawaka and the delicious whiff of bratwurst and cigarette smoke.
(Garrison Keillor, "Walking Down The Canyon." Time, July 31, 2000)
12. Offer a contrast between image and reality--that is, between a common misconception and the opposing truth.
They aren’t what most people think they are. Human eyes, touted as ethereal objects by poets and novelists throughout history, are nothing more than white spheres, somewhat larger than your average marble, covered by a leather-like tissue known as sclera and filled with nature’s facsimile of Jell-O. Your beloved’s eyes may pierce your heart, but in all likelihood they closely resemble the eyes of every other person on the planet. At least I hope they do, for otherwise he or she suffers from severe myopia (near-sightedness), hyperopia (far-sightedness), or worse. . .
(John Gamel, "The Elegant Eye." Alaska Quarterly Review, 2009)
http://grammar.about.com/od/developingessays/a/How-To-Begin-An-Essay-13-Engaging-Strategies-With-Examples.htm
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