5 Types of Introduction
5. Use a quotation. A quotation can be something you have read in a book or article. It can be something that you have heard: a popular saying or proverb ("Seeing is believing"), a current or recent advertising slogan ("Just do it"), or a favorite expression used by friends and family ("My grandmother always says . . . "). Using a quotation in your introductory paragraph lets you add someone else's voice to your own.
Example A "Fish and visitors," wrote Benjamin Franklin, "begin to smell after three days." Last summer, when my sister and her family came to spend their two-week vacation with us. I became convinced that Franklin was right. After only three days of my family's visit, I was thoroughly sick of my brother-in-law's corny jokes, my sister's endless complaints about her boss, and their children's constant invasions of our privacy.
3. Explain the importance of your topic to the reader. If you can convince your readers that the subject in some way applies to the them, or is something they should know about, they will want to keep reading.
Example B Diseases like scarlet fever and whooping cough used to kill more young children than any other cause. Today, however, child mortality due to disease has been almost completely eliminated by medical science. Instead, car accidents are the number one killer of our children, and most of the children fatally injured by car accidents were not protected by car seats, belts, or restraints of any kind. Several steps must be taken to reduce the serious dangers car accidents pose to our children.
4. Use an anecdote or brief story. Stories are naturally interesting. They appeal to a reader's curiosity. In your introduction, an anecdote will grab the reader's attention right away. The story should be brief and should be related to your main idea. The incident in the story can be something that happened to you, something you have heard about, or something you have read about in a newspaper or magazine or on a reliable website.
Example C Early Sunday morning the young mother dressed her little girl warmly and gave her a candy bar, a picture book, and a well-worn stuffed rabbit. Together, they drove downtown to a Methodist church. There the mother told the little girl to wait on the stone steps until the children began arriving for Sunday school. Then the young mother drove off, abandoning her five-year-old because she couldn't cope with being a parent anymore. This incident is one of thousands of cases of child neglect and abuse that occur annually. Perhaps the automatic right to become a parent should no longer exist. Would-be parents should be forced to apply for parental licenses for which they would have to meet three important conditions.
2. Start with an idea or situation that is the opposite of the one you will develop. This approach works because some readers will be surprised, and then intrigued, by the contrast between the opening idea and the thesis that follows it.
Example D When I decided to return to school at age thirty-five, I wasn't at all worried about my ability to do the work. After all, I was a grown woman who had raised a family, not a confused teenager fresh out of high school. But when I started classes, I realized that those "confused teenagers" sitting around me were in much better shape for college than I was. They still had all their classroom skills in bright, shiny condition, while mine had gone rusty from disuse. I had to learn how to locate information in a library, how to write a report, and even how to speak up in class discussion.
1. Begin with a broad, general statement of your topic and narrow it down to a thesis statement. Broad, general statements ease the reader into your thesis statement by first introducing the topic.
Example E Bookstore shelves today are crammed with dozens of different diet books. The American public seems willing to try any sort of diet, especially the ones that promise instant miraculous results, and authors are more than willing to invent new fad diets that cash in on this craze. Unfortunately, some of these fad diets are ineffective and even unsafe. One of the worst fad diets is the "Palm Beach" plan. It is impractical, doesn't achieve the results it claims, and is a sure route to poor nutrition.
