Essay'S Audience

Second, underlying these strategies is a smaller set of common purposes.

You might opt for the all-hook intro because you want to demonstrate up front your mastery of a body of relevant scholarship.

A noble rationale, but one that often has the unfortunate effect of suggesting to readers that you are so immersed in that scholarship that you haven’t figured out your own point of view.

This advice about avoiding the no hook and all I introduction may initially seem to run counter to the bold-pronouncement strategy we outlined above, but a closer look reveals that it is a distinctive variation, a “first I and then hook” progression.

The strategy involves moving from your arresting assertion to the context that sharpens its stakes.

Consequences This approach to introductions has ripple effects on the larger activity of writing an effective essay. We often find that authors use their first paragraphs for their abstracts.

We do not recommend this tactic, because, as we have discussed in a related article, introductions and abstracts have different purposes.Those three purposes are to: Applying the Strategies In practical terms, the main challenge of writing effective introductions is finding the sweet spot in which you properly balance your presentation of others’ work with your own ideas.We have two main suggestions for hitting that spot.Examples are Gerald Graff’s “Why How We Read Trumps What We Read” and John Hardwig’s “The Role of Trust in Knowledge.” The Bold Pronouncement Strategy.You announce an especially arresting thesis in your opening sentence or sentences.At the same time, this possible objection helps clarify the situations in which it makes sense to employ the bold-pronouncement strategy: those in which readers of the journal will immediately recognize the striking quality of the thesis, the ways it seeks to take the scholarly conversation in a substantially new direction.Why might authors go for just the hook or just the I?As we say, abstracts are spoilers not teasers, because they give your audience a condensed version of your whole article: what your claim is, why it matters and how you will conduct your argument for it.Introductions, by contrast, are teasers that soon stop teasing.That’s understandably so: not only is a lot riding on an essay’s introduction, but it also needs to accomplish multiple rhetorical tasks efficiently.And while everyone knows the general purpose of the introduction -- to state the essay's thesis -- many people have trouble determining how best to get to that statement. First, there are many effective strategies for building up to that statement.