Hi! I'm Professor Hitch, and today, I want to
talk to you about introductions. Uh, I'm going to
divide this into three parts, I think. Most introductions have at least three
parts to them: first, I want to talk to you about hooks,
then i want to talk to you about like the actual
introduction material of your introduction, how do you introduce your
essay, and then we'll finish up with thesis statements
at the end. Although, perhaps I won't spend too much time on
that, that frankly is a whole other video. So, to start:
let's talk about hooks! How do you get somebody interested in your essay?
Should you even be thinking about that? It's understandable to think when you're
writing an essay that you don't owe it to the reader to get them interested.
After all, your reader is often your English professor. It might be me
and you might very well say, "Well, Professor Hitch, you wanted to read it,
here it is," but i want to tell you right now hooks
are very important. Um, they're one of the things that
separates a good essay from a great essay. A good essay just
follows all the rules, gets to the end, makes a good point.
A great essay takes the time to get you emotionally invested
in what, whatever, it is you're writing. Um, so how do you get that person
emotionally invested? Well, I think you have a couple different strategies.
Strategy number one: you can start with a narrative
um, it can be a narrative related to your topic.
It can be a personal story of some kind. I think you have some flexibility here.
It can also be something that you completely made up,
which is crazy, I know, uh, if you are choosing to make up a story completely
from scratch, try to follow the rules of good
narrative composition. Uh, make sure that this is a story that's
worth telling because a poorly told story has the
potential to kind of blow up in your face a little
bit. Um, it can make the writer look a little bit biased, it can...
it just doesn't, it doesn't, [stuttering] it doesn't quite sound right so
with hooks, you can try to begin with a story.
With hooks, you can also begin with a quote.
Um, the jury's kind of out on this one. I know that there are other
professors out there who don't think too kindly about starting with a quote,
but i would,
i would edit what it is they're saying and tell you all this:
it's not so much that you can't start with a quote; it's you can't start with a
bad quote. Um, if you're gonna quote something fine,
something really juicy, something that's kind of shocking even,
maybe, and share that thing and if you can't get to that occasion, if you can't
figure out that, like, really juicy quote that you want to share with your reader
then that's a sign that maybe you shouldn't be quoting.
And to that same effect, I would say you can start with a question.
Yes, you may have heard from other teachers that you shouldn't be starting
with questions, but i'll say the same thing about that that i did about
quoting. Don't start with bad questions, um, one of
the worst questions i ever read at the start of an essay was a student who
started his essay by saying, and i kid you not, "have you ever
considered going to college?" [silence]
I have multiple graduate degrees; the answer is yes; I did consider going to
college, i came, i saw, i conquered, done. Uh, so that's not gonna work as far as
the questions go, um, but on the flip side, i think there
are a lot of really strong questions that you
can ask to get the reader engaged in your essay.
The strongest question that I can ever remember reading, um,
and this was actually not a student. To be fair, this was a news article,
and yet it was still such a mind-blowing question.
Um, the question was "why are hundreds of thousands of people
driving around with live explosives in their car?" [silence]
Am I one of those people? I read that question and immediately I was
hyper focused on whatever it was they were gonna say next because I wanted to
know: "Am I one of those people? Do I not
understand what's going on in my car?" and of course, the answer to that, for
anyone who's curious, is, um, toyota airbags, yeah, you got to watch
out for those. Some of them are defective and they do have the explosive force
to really seriously injure you if they go off at the wrong time.
So, to review for hooks, there are three kinds of hooks we've talked about so far:
you can start with a narrative, you can start with a quote,
or you can also start with a question. Keep in mind, if you're starting with a
quote or a question that it should be a strong quote or question.
In addition to those three strategies,
you can begin with a provocative statement,
um, depending on your creativity, depending on how much time you have, you
really may only be able to pump out just like a very
sort of provocative saying, um, something to challenge your reader a
little bit. So, let's say that you're writing about
college tuition. You might start by saying something like
"college tuition is too damn low."
Yeah, that's provocative. That's going to get me reading, i'm going to want to know
what happens next after that because that conflicts
with the way that i see the world. So, that's an example of a provocative
statement. Um, so that covers hooks. Then we jump
over into the actual introduction content,
like what goes in an introduction. Um, when I think about what goes in an
introduction, the very first thing that comes into my mind is
"Is there anything that my reader needs to know about my topic?"
At first glance, you might, you might think no,
like this is such an obvious easy topic but consider for a moment the following:
"If you're writing about yourself, how much does your reader know about you?"
There may be some things you're going to want to share,
if you're writing about something that you've researched.
Even though because of that research this is now like such an
obvious thing for you, is it going to be obvious to somebody who maybe didn't do
that research? There may be some context from that
research that you want to throw into your introduction,
above and beyond, talking about yourself above and beyond, researching though
your reader just might not know very much. Don't take chances! I mean, when in
doubt, you want to put that information in the
introduction. The great thing about an introduction is even if you think the
value of what you're saying is maybe only so-so, you're not really saying anything too interesting that's okay you haven't even
started your essay yet. Your essay doesn't "really" start until
the thesis statement. So, say your boring stuff now so that
when you do start talking about the interesting stuff
later, your reader is going to have that context. Your reader is going to know.
In addition to providing the very necessary context to read your essay,
other things you may want to consider in your introduction,
um, would be,
not so much context of what you're writing about but perhaps history.
So where was your topic before you started writing about it? If you're
writing about the drinking age today, what was the drinking age 50 years ago?
That's not necessarily something i need to understand your topic
today but having that historical context is really
interesting and it's important. I think you may want to explain your topic a
little bit. I read an essay about Halo ice cream
and i had always wondered how halo ice cream
has such low calorie count. I've actually had halo ice cream, and for whatever
reason, i just wasn't observant enough to look and check out
why it had such low calorie count. I had a student in her introduction
write about halo ice cream and in her introduction very specifically
she mentioned, [stuttering], she mentioned that it's made with stevia
instead of sugar, and i was like "oh my god that totally explains everything!"
Um, so you never know when providing like a little bit of extra context to be
about your topic, be it historical context, be it simply
explaining what your topic is, you never know when that's
going to make an impact with the reader. So you want to front load as much of
that information as possible so that once you do get to your thesis you're
ready to go. Speaking of theses, and yes, that is the
plural for thesis statements. Speaking of theses,
what about those? Well there's one classic way that i think a lot of us
have been taught to do thesis statements, and that's the
traditional three-part thesis statement. Um, you set up an argument, your argument
has three reasons, you include all three reasons in your thesis statement.
The drinking age should be lowered because
of the army age, the smoking age, and because i said so!
The third one's not a very good reason but i'm making this up on the spot so
bear with me. That's an example of a three-part thesis
statement. Three-part thesis statements are okay.
There's nothing wrong with them. Um, but think of them like training
wheels. You need them only up until the point
that you're confident to work on things on your own instead. So you may find with
your thesis statement you only really have two main points
and if that's the case that's fine. Two main points it is, two point thesis
statement. Um, the important thing that you do in
your thesis statement regardless of the kind of the shape that it takes
is you want to very clearly state your claim using as
few words as possible. I have encountered students
who have a tendency to write very long thesis statements:
three lines, four lines, I've seen five line thesis statements, and to that I
would say you may be trying to argue your essay
before you've actually started arguing your essay.
Your thesis statement only sets up the main controlling idea.
You need to leave it up to the bodies of your essay to actually elaborate on that
controlling idea and sort of make it make sense.
In addition to that, when your thesis statement is five lines long, that is
five lines that i might get lost in, any of those five lines, and as soon as I
do, you've kind of screwed up the whole
essay. If i don't understand your thesis statement, I don't understand where your
body paragraphs are going, it's it's not connected anymore.
Um the final piece of advice that i'll offer you about thesis statements is
try to make sure that your thesis statements connect to
your topic sentences. Um, so, if you're going to write a thesis statement with a
key word, like drinking age,
then at least one of your topic sentences should also have that same
keyword, drinking age, and when you match up those
words between your topic sentences and your
thesis statement, that's what shows your reader, "Yes, I know what I'm talking about,
this is my topic, and I'm going to keep going on it."
I think that's it for now! Stay tuned for more on thesis statements
in the future. I hope this was helpful!