How to Begin an Essay: 13 Engaging

Strategies
Examples of Introductory Paragraphs That Capture Our Interest and Attention

By Richard Nordquist

Grammar & Composition Expert

An effective introductory paragraph both informs and motivates: it lets readers know what your
essay is about and it encourages them to keep reading. There are countless ways to begin an essay
effectively. As a start, here are 13 introductory strategies accompanied by examples from a wide
range of professional writers.

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. Pose a question related to your subject and then answer it (or invite your readers to answer
it).

What is the charm of necklaces? Why would anyone put something extra around their neck and
then invest it with special significance? A necklace doesn't afford warmth in cold weather, like a
scarf, or protection in combat, like chain mail; it only decorates. We might say, it borrows meaning
from what it surrounds and sets off, the head with its supremely important material contents, and
the face, that register of the soul. When photographers discuss the way in which a photograph
reduces the reality it represents, they mention not only the passage from three dimensions to
two, but also the selection of a point de vue that favors the top of the body rather than the
bottom, and the front rather than the back. The face is the jewel in the crown of the body, and so
we give it a setting. . . .

(Emily R. Grosholz, "On Necklaces." Prairie Schooner, Summer 2007)

3. 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)

4. 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)

5. 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)

6. 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)

7. 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)

8. 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)

9. 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)

10. 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)

11. 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)

12. 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)

13. 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)

Reference:

Nordquist, R. “How to Begin an Essay: 13 Engaging Strategies”, available at

http://grammar.about.com/od/developingessays/a/How-To-Begin-An-Essay-13-Engaging-
Strategies-With-Examples.htm