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Writing the Introduction

One of the most difficult parts of writing anything is figuring out how to start. Think of
your opening as having three parts: writing workshop

1. The hook
2. Context
3. Your claim or thesis

The Hook
Regardless of who the members of your audience are, they have demands on their time and
a lot of options for what to read. You have to make them want to read your piece. So, begin
your argument by “hooking” your readers with some kind of attention grabber. This might
be a shocking fact, a startling statistic, or (since this has been the focus of this workshop)
maybe a profound personal story, related to, but different from the personal experience you
offer as evidence in the body of your essay. If you think back to the rhetorical appeals
discussed in Chapter 3, you can see that a successful hook often relies on an appeal to
pathos — emotion. Pathos is the spice of an argument. It makes it interesting, gives it flavor,
but it should be used sparingly. The hook is a great place to use it. As you saw above,
Mckesson’s hook is his devastating story about being bullied as a child, which powerfully
draws his readers into the rest of his argument.

The Context
Another thing to think about when starting your argument is how much background you
need to provide for your audience. If your audience does not understand the context of
your argument, you have little chance of persuading them of your claim. The amount of
context you need to include will vary based on the complexity of the issue or the
specificity of the evidence you will likely use. For Mckesson, while he starts his essay
with the story of his being bullied, his argument isn’t really about childhood bullies, so
he has to provide his readers with a bit of context so they can see that what he’s really
talking about it as a metaphor of a larger societal issue:
I’ve thought a lot more about the role of the bully too — about how he moves, adapts, and
survives over time; about his source of legitimacy; about the impact of his power. Of late,
I’ve thought about the bully in the context of our present world versus the world that we aim
to create for the future, and considering him has transformed the way I think about both.

Writing Your Introduction activity

Write a draft of your introductory paragraph by putting together the following components:
• Your hook (ethos, logos, or pathos)
• Appropriate and necessary context — the background information your audience will
need to understand what follows
• Your claim, which you developed earlier, and which you may have revised after
conducting additional research
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