von Wallmenich • English 101
Roadmap to Good Writing
Introductions
The Introduction is one of the most important parts of an essay. By the end of the first
paragraph, readers will have already formed an impression of both the argument they are about
to read (indeed, if they will read it) and they will have made a huge number of critical
assessments about the writer. First impressions are important. Luckily, just as we have certain
habits and customs for meeting people on a daily basis, we also have procedures for meeting
each other in writing. This handout provides a model, not a formula, for the first paragraph of an
argumentative essay.
The Introduction:
What is the purpose of an introductory paragraph?
1) to grab a reader's attention.
2) to orient a reader on the subject and topic of the essay.
3) to set up a claim.
4) to make a claim that governs the essay as a whole.
5) to provide a cursory roadmap for the essay.
We will break these into the following corresponding parts:
1) prelude
2) orientation
3) premise
4) claim
5) method
Prelude:
There are a number of ways to begin an essay. While direct entry (that is, stating a claim in the
first sentence) may seem efficient, it is better to say hello first. Limit your prelude to 2-4
sentences. The following list is just what comes to mind:
a) epigram (a leading quotation) and comment
b) anecdote (a "true" story that encapsulates a point)
c) analogy (the sample below is both anecdote & analogy)
d) question ("Why do we tell stories?")
e) generalization (This is a weak strategy: be careful!)
f) definition ("Original Sin is..."
g) warning or strong statement
h) note: historical, factual, observation
i) setting or background ("Salem..."
j) medias res (in the middle of things) (epigrams work well)
k) sensational detail
von Wallmenich • English 101
Be inventive! Remember that you are establishing contact with a reader. Usually first drafts of a
prelude are longer than they should be. This can be condensed later, in revision.
von Wallmenich • English 101
Orientation:
Obviously we are orienting a reader from the first word of the title to the last word of the
introduction. However, there are few standard procedures that we need to follow.
1) Use the author's first and last name the first time you introduce him or her. Only use
the last name after this point. If you haven't mentioned the author and title(s) of the
story you are writing on, do so in the orientation. Integrate such information into a
sentence that is setting up the subject or topic.
2) The orientation should orient a reader on the subject and the topic of the essay. You
are funneling a reader to your claim, which will be highly specific, so you need to
ensure that they know the context of the claim.
Premise:
After you have oriented a reader and narrowed the focus to a topic, you are prepared to make a
claim or thesis statement. However, just because I have let my readers know that my topic is the
importance of setting to allegory in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" does not
mean that they are prepared for me to claim that his use of setting subverts any attempt to
determine the allegorical meaning of the story. I need to make a bridge between the topic and
my claim, and I will do this by providing a premise, a specific point of departure for
investigating the topic. I like to think of this step using the formula, "if x, then what?" Often
articulating the question or problem that your claim addresses is the best way to establish the
premise. A brief statement of your counter-argument may also help. Do not dwell on the
counter-argument in the introduction.
Claim:
The claim is the conceptual center of the essay. The most concise expression of your claim
should occur in your introduction. Assignment 1 addressed the question of how we decide upon
an arguable claim. The problem now is that of expression. How do we express our claim in
introduction? Remember that you are under no burden to prove your claim in the introduction:
you have the whole essay to do this. See separate worksheet on effective thesis statements.
Method:
After you have expressed your claim, further orient your reader by providing a brief map of the
essay. The essay will demonstrate the claim by attending to such and such aspects of the story.
Sample Introductions
Sample Introduction 1
(From the historian William Cronin’s book on the Cold War):
[Premise]
History is ordinarily told as the history of nations, as the working out over
time of national identities, goals, and political projects. As such, it often slights
the local, the personal, and the interpersonal, and it approaches the international
order either as the sum of national developments or in terms of relations between
stable, clearly delineated states. The omissions that follow from this
von Wallmenich • English 101
[Orientation]
[Premise]
[Claim]
[Method]
practice of grounding history in “the national experience” are many and serious,
but the most debilitating effect of this bias is that it keeps hidden the traumatic
and highly consequential processes by which nations themselves come into being,
are held together, and are sometimes torn apart. Unlike the Versailles
settlement, the reshaping and regrouping of states that occurred after the Second
World War was not conceived of in particularly national terms, People spoke,
instead, of world orders or of confrontations between rival ideologies and social
systems, and national boundaries were less often explicitly debated than had been
the case after the first World War. Nevertheless, what the post-Second World War
settlement did was to reconstitute nations, national identities, and national
political systems within a new set of international constraints. To speak, then,
of a postwar world order, or international system, without attending o the
transformations of national realities, is to miss what was really at stake in the
turbulent politics of the early Cold War era.