Many types of essays and papers have specified introductions. For example, many lab reports begin with a section called “Abstract” or “Objective.” Sometimes they have an “Introduction” that explains why the experiment is being done.

But for many other essays, the introduction does not have a set form. For those essays, you as a writer have just one chance to get your reader interested in your subject, and the tone of the introduction has to be just right. You want to inform, but not to the point of being dull; you want to intrigue, but not to the point of being vague; you want to take a strong stance, but not to the point of angering your reader.

The following examples are models of the approaches you can use to begin an essay. They begin in a number of different ways:

With an anecdote that leads into the main topic:

A student editor, criticizing the draft of a catalogue for a new college, three times deleted the words “liberal education” from the draft. Coming upon it again she circled the words and wrote in the margin: “What in the world is it?”

            –Harris Wolfford, “In Search of Liberal Education”

With the setting as background for what will follow:

Roman Wortman first decided to turn to organic faming one day in the spring of 1972, when he rode out on his tractor to spray his fields with a new pesticide and found he was leaving a trail of dead birds behind him. “There was half a dozen of them at the edge of the field,” he told me as we stood under a blazing Nebraska sun looking over his cornfields. “I rode back into the yard and there was more dead birds along the driveway where I had sprayed only a half hour before.” He fixed his keen brown eyes on me for a moment. “I turned around and I said to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing out here?’ From that day to this, I’ve never used another pesticide, herbicide, or fertilizer on this farm.” He waved his arm out over his field of corn and alfalfa, which were shimmering with a bright, deep green. “Look what I have to show for it,” he said.          

–William Tucker, “The Next American Dustbowl . . . and How to Avert It”

With narration, beginning in the middle of things, inviting further reading:

You wake up one morning with a vague sense of unease. Everything seems normal—until you move. And then, brother, you scream. A demon seems to be stabbing at the base of your big toe with a sharp, red-hot poker. Even the light touch of the sheet gouges your nerves. Carefully, delicately, you remove the bedclothes and examine the shiny red swelling at the tender joint. Try to wiggle the toe—and scream again. Cautiously swing your legs to the floor and the whole foot throbs in agony. Wondering how you broke your toe, you limp into your doctor’s office and get the news, as I did a few years ago: No broken bones my friends; it’s the gout.

–Rafael Steinberg, “If You Are Highly Sexed, Achievement Oriented and a Wine Connoisseur, This May Be Your Disease”

With a quotation relevant to the thought:

“Yes, we are revolutionaries,” acknowledges the fortyish executive, a top salesman for one of America’s largest and fastest-growing corporations. “What we are doing will no doubt leave a very lasting impression on America. We are going to turn the world of white-collar work upside down, inside-out, and make it do what it’s supposed to do—work.”
            No small boast, that. But this man, who prefers to be an anonymous revolutionary, speaks confidently, for he has seen a vision of the future—and it is electronic.”

–Jon Stewart, “Computer Shock: The Inhuman Office of the Future”

With a firm statement of opinion arousing the reader’s feelings:

The first year of the 1980s may or may not bring a new president to the White House, but it will, for certain, see a new incumbent in a high artistic post that has had a lot less changes over seven decades. After all those years in which the direction of the great Phiadelphia Orchestra has been in the hands of only two men (Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy), it will pass to Riccardo Muti. This move is somewhat like elevating a parish priest to the papacy.

–Irving Kolodin, “Music to My Ears: Provincialism on the Podium”

With a prediction:

America is facing a manpower crisis of awesome and dangerous proportions. What is done, or not done, about it in the next few years will affect the quality of life in this country for generations. Nor is it any exaggeration to say that if the correct solutions for the problem are not conceived and carried out, the United States will be confronted with potential disaster.

–John Tebbel, “People and Jobs”

With unusual or sensual detail:

Physicians may one day treat patients who have shattered limbs, crippled joints, and injured spines in a way never before dared to dream of: regrowing the damaged part—whole perfect and undiseased.

–Susan Schiefelbein, “The Miracle of Regeneration: Can Human Limbs Grow Back?”

With reflective questions:

If, indeed, it is true that taxes are inevitable as death, what considerations determine whether we must pay more or less? Isn’t it simply a matter of how much money “the government” needs to meet its responsibilities to the people? Why can’t we take a good, hard look at what we want government to spend money on, set a price tag for these services, and then collect the money deemed necessary according to an ability-to-pay formula, or on some other equitable basis? Wouldn’t this be a great deal simpler than our present system of exemptions, deductions, write-offs, and a thousand and one other opportunities for maneuver that have made national pastime of searching for “tax-angles”? In other words, once we have agreed that, in one way or another, government must collect the tax revenue it needs to stay in business, doesn’t it all boil down to finding the fairest means to raise the money?

–Haig Babian, “Can Taxes Do More Than Raise Revenue?”

With a definition:

Overlive means that we have more than enough for everyone but not everyone gets his share. It’s as simple as that.

–Charles J. Calitri, “Everybody Wants In”

With a figure of speech:

Insomnia is my baby. We have been going steady for a good twenty years now, and there is no hint that the dull baggage is ready to break off the affair.

–Roger Alkeell, “Ainmosni”

With a play on words:

A sign over one section of public library in my town reads “Young Adults Oversize.” Although it refers to books too large for normal shelving, it might also stand as a metaphor for the college student who has outgrown the limits of his own collection of textbooks and “favorite” authors, who seeks to pin down the expanding world of ideas into which he is moving to something solid and permanent.

–David Dempsey, “Seventh Army Loveman Award”

With humor:

There’s good news in the paper. America has its first drive-in funeral parlor. I had almost given up hope that the country could ever reach the goal that it is so obviously striving for—the day when we will be able to do everything without getting out of the car. But now I know that the impossible dream is possible.

–William Zinsser, “Time Saver for Busy Mourners”

Other ways to begin:

1. With a contrast.
2. With a fact that’s not commonly known or perhaps even shocking.
3. With a paradox.
4. With relevant background material.
5. By stating long-term effects without acknowledging the cause.
6. With a concession or by recognizing the arguments of writers who disagree with you.
7. With unrelated facts that will be tied together later.

Finally, you might want to consider writing your introduction AFTER you've written the rest of your paper. Many writers find that they have a better grip on their subject once they've done their first draft. This "better grip" helps them to craft an introduction that is sure-footed, persuasive, interesting, and clear

Because the beginning is an important element in establishing a good relation between you and your reader, you should avoid these introductions:

The apology, complaint or personal dilemma:

I have now read Lolita for the first time, and even though I didn’t understand most of it and even though I didn’t pay attention as closely as I should have, I think that I can safely say that this book is really uninteresting. I think this because a lot of the words are hard to understand.

If it looks like you don’t care, neither will your reader.

The panoramic beginning, typically a survey reaching back to the dim past:

Love is a topic that has been handled in many artworks since the beginning of time. In Africa ancient statues of naked women have been found. In ancient Greek myth, Homer and his contemporaries wrote about the love-lives of gods and goddesses. In the intervening years, people have used love in many ways to express many things, and it is no surprise that soap operas often use love in their story lines.

We just skipped 2500 years of history. If this were time travel, cool. If this were an academic essay, we just failed.

The mystery opening, which assumes the reader knows what the writer is discussing:

The main thing I noticed in the poem was the way tone changed from stanza to stanza.

What poem are we talking about? What kind of tone?

The perfectly obvious statement:

Romeo and Juliet is a play about two lovers and their family and friends.

Many books offer insights into the lives of human beings.

In the past, science has been used positively, but it has also been used negatively.

A boring definition:

Webster’s Dictionary defines love as . . .

Dictionary.com describes the word envelope as . . .

An overused quotation:

“To be or not to be,” that is a question.

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”

And that’s not true. I fear that quotation.

The overly direct statement:

In this paper, I will write about . . .

This paper for Dr. Person will focus on . . .

The topic to be explained in this essay is . . .

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