Do you want your essay to get a good grade? Do you want your essay to be interesting and do you want to hear from your professor or colleague that you have done a good, or perhaps an excellent work? Well, I guess the majority of people like when their work gets fairly appreciated, they feel confidence and pride about their completing a task, achieving a goal and producing a really good piece of writing. But is it an easy task to write a good paper? Well, actually it is, if you know exactly how to do that and what parts of the essay are important and require special attention.
Introduction is one of most important parts of the essay. If the reader does not like the introduction, he or she will most likely not read the rest of the paper, or will read it with little attention. Introduction is the part of your essay where you need to catch the attention of your reader together with informing him/her what your paper will be about.
In order to meet the requirements mentioned above you need to follow several steps in writing an introduction to your essay. First of all you need to begin with grabbing attention of your audience. There are several ways how you can do that:
- You can ask questions.
- Show some shocking statistics or facts, that will also make your reader be more interested in reading about your topic and will urge to further read your paper.
- Use quotations from the speeches of famous people, well known movies or books. Keep them short though and make relevant to your topic.
- Tell a short story or an anecdote.
If, for instance, you prepare a speech you should ask open-ended questions. Then, you will receive some feedbacks from your audience. Asking such questions is an excellent way to draw attention of the listeners to your topic and make them interact by answering your questions and feel satisfied about being listened to. In preparing the speech this trick in the introduction will provide you with listeners who will be willing to hear the rest of your speech with pleasure.
Actually in the case you tell a short story or an anecdote you need to make sure it is short and is relevant to your subject. Starting your paper in such a way can be very effective but once more, you need to be very careful not to make it too long or boring.
Dialogue is another means that can be used in catching attention of readers. It is better if the dialogue you decide to use will not have an identity of your speakers. Just try to keep it short, two or three exchanges between your speakers should be enough.
Also while writing an introduction please use a verifiable information and by no means try to make thing up, as it can make your reader loose confidence in you and interest in your paper. Do not use new information in your introduction part. the information you use should be well known and easily comprehensible and should by no means be totally new to the reader of your essay. At the end of your introduction put a thesis statement of your essay. You can put it right away, or if you had only a sentence or two – in the attention grabber part (the hook). Then, you may add few more sentences that will gradually develop the thesis statement of your paper and finish the introduction part. Good luck in writing effective introductions!