So many students struggle to start their essays. Putting down the very first sentence is always a challenging task. However, most students don’t fully grasp what should make a good introduction. They feel at a loss when it’s time to write the first paragraph. It shouldn’t be this way. An intro must include only a few essential elements. Once a person knows them, they won’t have any trouble doing their work. So here is how to write a good introduction paragraph for an essay.
What Makes a Proper Intro
Writing a good intro paragraph requires experience. You need to understand what you must include in the first paragraph as well as what should be excluded from it. Overall your intro must include only the most important information about your paper, which is the background, general theme, and purpose of writing. Hence, it has to let people know what they are getting into when opening up your work.
Your goal is to attract your audience's attention and to interest them in further reading. It’s not always an easy task. To achieve that goal, you'll have to be brief, creative, and leave a good first impression. It must be engaging yet informative enough to create a full picture of your future work. However, if you master this work, you'll never lose a reader again. Sometimes, students also add a map of their future work, so readers would have an easier time seeing what comes when.
Let’s see what elements should be present in your introduction.
Think About the Hook
You need to think of ways to attract readers’ attention, starting with the very first line. Your first sentence must have something promising, intriguing, and straight to the point, so your readers would know what they are getting into. Fortunately, there are multiple ways you can think of when it comes to this tactic. Overall, such a technique is called a hook. All good introduction paragraph examples will have one of those at the very beginning of the paragraph.
A hook is a technique that must grab a person’s attention and engage them in further reading. There can be several ways of how you can achieve that. Here they are:
- a famous quote from a well-known person;
- quote from the work you cire in your essay;
- related data or statistics;
- brief story;
- question (something related to the topic);
- thesis statement;
- metaphor;
- a common misconception about the topic;
- declaration (writer’s position on the topic).
A writer should use those hooks in accordance with the type of paper, theme, and overall tone of their work. Thus, whenever you think about how to start a good essay introduction, think about the hook. Weigh your options and decide which kind is more appropriate for your type of paper.
Outline a Theme of Your Work
Once your readers are ‘hooked’ you can proceed to give them slightly more detail about your work. Hence, at this stage, they need to learn what the theme of your paper is. A theme of the paper will explain what exactly you are writing about and why. Hence, you have to give some background of your research. Let people know why you have started this work, what other research has been done on the same topic, and what you are planning to do differently.
Be Clear With Your Thesis
A thesis statement should always be the core of your introduction. In fact, a thesis is the core idea of the entire paper. Indeed, a thesis statement carries the reason why you have started this essay or term paper in the first place. It must inform people about your topic, your take on it, and what you are going to discover/find out/prove.
More often than not, writing a good introduction paragraph means writing a good thesis and clear thesis statement. It should be easy to find. Usually, a thesis statement is the last sentence (or sentences) of your first paragraph. However, sometimes, people tend to start with it. Overall, it doesn’t matter much where the thesis is located. The most important part is that readers could designate it once they have read the entire introduction.
Match up Your Intro to Your Conclusion
Many students tend to forget about the introduction once they are done with it. Well, that is a common but poor mistake. You have to remember your first paragraph throughout the entire essay writing. After all, what is an introduction paragraph of an essay? It is the definition of your entire work. It states why you are doing it, what goal you are pursuing, and other crucial information.
Hence, once you finish the essay’s main body, you have to look back at the very beginning of your work. See whether you have answered every answer you were going to answer. Read your thesis statement once again and see whether you have set your expectations or not. Make sure you have stayed on the topic the entire time. Often, people take a step in the wrong direction. They move further from the initial theme and lose touch with the intro. That’s a mistake. Here’s how to avoid it.
When you are writing a conclusion, make sure it matches up with your first paragraph. Hence, your conclusion should be very similar to the introduction, with the only difference that it carries all the answers to your questions. In case your research has moved in a slightly different direction, consider making some adjustments in the intro.
Overall, your work with the instruction is not done as long as you need to finish your conclusion. Some people even prefer writing their first paragraph along with their last one. Of course, such tactics may have their perks. However, this way, you’ll be able to develop a full idea of the nature and direction of your paper. You can try doing it both ways and deciding what you’d prefer for yourself.
