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Writing Introductions for Expository Essays
1. Use a brief but descriptive anecdote. This strategy gets readers emotionally involved
FOR EXAMPLE:
For twenty-seven years, Mao Zedong’s corpse has rested peacefully
in a mausoleum in the center of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square,
disturbed only by tourists and city residents who have passed by to
pay their respects to the first leader of communist China. But now a
group of prominent Chinese intellectuals wants the government to
finally bury him – along with many of his ideas.
2. Create an interesting, attention grabbing scenario (an imaginative projection of the
future, or some hypothetical moment you want to create to make a point).
FOR EXAMPLE:
Imagine a snowstorm close to the summit of a 6100-meter peak in
the Andes. On the descent, your climbing partner slips in treacherous
conditions. His leg is badly broken. For hours you struggle to winch him
down the mountainside. The cold is unbearable, and you must battle
fatigue and dehydration. Then disaster strikes afresh: tethered to the
rope, your friend slips over an unseen cliff. The sound of his cries is lost in
the blizzard. As he dangles below, you cannot know whether he is alive or
dead, but his weight is pulling you inexorably to the edge. Without prompt
action, you will die. Do you cut the rope?
3. Present a startling statistic – shock readers out of their ho-hum complacency. It's up
to the writer to make readers care!
FOR EXAMPLE:
Four billion people will be diagnosed with HIV this year. As if this
number weren't staggering enough, consider this. In any given
college classroom, statistically one in every four students will be
diagnosed with HIV.
4. Begin with a meaningful, colorful, or famous quotation-it establishes your credibility
and sometimes challenges your readers
FOR EXAMPLE:
Time stands still for no man. Time takes its
toll. Time is of the essence. During a recent
visit to Burma’s Shan state, the heart of the
infamous Golden Triangle, I thought often of
those commonplace English expressions –
partly because almost none of the clocks
told the correct time.
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5. Ask a question-involve the reader immediately.
FROM "Obedience" in ADBUSTERS (No.29, Spring 2000)
Are today's young women and men more skeptical of
authority than their parents were and more inclined to rebel
against conformity? The question arose recently in an
undergraduate philosophy class in Freedom and
Responsibility I was teaching at the University of Toronto.
We had just watched the tapes of the infamous Stanley
Milgram obedience experiments from the early 1960s,
which were designed to test the moral malleability of other
wise upstanding citizens in the face of coercive, patriarchal
authority of Science. Milgram himself was shocked by the
result: over 50 percent of the residents of New Haven,
Connecticut, appeared willing to electroshock a fellow
citizen into unconsciousness, perhaps even death, simply
because a man in a white coat told them to. …
6. Give your readers background information they may need. Provide a context for your
discussion by establishing a frame of reference.
FOR EXAMPLE:
When ENRON launched an era of scandal in 2002, Old Europe had a
good sneer about the ugly excesses of American capitalism. Now
Europe has a scandal as large as any uncovered in the United States.
8-14 billion have gone missing at Parmalat, a global dairy
conglomerate based in the northern Italian city of Parma. CEO Calisto
Tanzi is now in a Milan jail along with a dozen other executives.
7. Come up with your own creative "hook."
FOR EXAMPLE:
The recent murder-suicides at Columbine High School have shocked
the nation and left us wondering why someone, somewhere along
the line had not seen the evil afoot and taken steps to stop it. The
question has been directed particularly to the perpetrators' parents.
The signs were there- exploding pipe bombs in the garage, a
sawed-off shotgun barrel on a dresser, neo-Nazi messages left on
the computer-yet on parent intervened. A possible explanation for
such inaction may be found in an examination of the dysfunctional
family relationships in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Instead
of directly addressing an obvious problem, family members choose
to play into a fantasy, a fantasy that culminates in suicide.
The meaning of “No!”…