Some kinds of paragraphs deserve special attention.

Opening paragraphs

Even a good piece of writing may remain unread if it has a weak opening paragraph. In addition to announcing your topic (usually in a thesis statement), an introductory paragraph must engage readers’ interest and focus their attention on what is to follow. At their best, introductory paragraphs serve as hors d’oeuvres, whetting the appetite for the following courses.

One common kind of opening paragraph follows the general-to-specific pattern, in which the writer opens with a general statement and then gets more and more specific, ultimately concluding with the thesis.

Throughout Western civilization, places such as the ancient Greek agora, the New England town hall, the local church, the coffeehouse, the village square, and even the street corner have been arenas for debate on public affairs and society. Out of thousands of such encounters, “public opinion” slowly formed and became the context in which politics was framed. Although the public sphere never included everyone, and by itself did not determine the outcome of all parliamentary actions, it contributed to the spirit of dissent found in a healthy representative democracy. Many of these public spaces remain, but they are no longer centers for political discussion and action. They have largely been replaced by television and other forms of media—forms that arguably isolate citizens from one another rather than bringing them together.

—MARK POSTER, “The Net as a Public Sphere”

In this paragraph, the opening sentence introduces a general subject—sites of public debate throughout history; subsequent sentences focus more specifically on political discussion; and the concluding sentence presents the thesis, which the rest of the essay will develop. Other effective ways of opening an essay include using quotations, anecdotes, questions, or strong opinions.

Opening with a quotation

There is a bumper sticker that reads, “Too bad ignorance isn’t painful.” I like that. But ignorance is. We just seldom attribute the pain to it or even recognize it when we see it. Take the postcard on my corkboard. It shows a young man in a very hip jacket smoking a cigarette. In the background is a high school with the American flag waving. The caption says, “Too cool for school. Yet too stupid for the real world.” Out of the mouth of the young man is a bubble enclosing the words “Maybe I’ll start a band.” There could be a postcard showing a jock in a uniform saying, “I don’t need school. I’m going to the NFL or NBA.” Or one showing a young man or woman studying and a group of young people saying, “So you want to be white.” Or something equally demeaning. We need to quit it.

—NIKKI GIOVANNI, “Racism 101”

Opening with an anecdote

I first met Angela Carter at a dinner in honor of the Chilean writer José Donoso at the home of Liz Calder, who then published all of us. My first novel was soon to be published; it was the time of Angela’s darkest novel, “The Passion of New Eve.” And I was a great fan. Mr. Donoso arrived looking like a Hispanic Buffalo Bill, complete with silver goatee, fringed jacket and cowboy boots, and proceeded, as I saw it, to patronize Angela terribly. His apparent ignorance of her work provoked me into a long expostulation in which I informed him that the woman he was talking to was the most brilliant writer in England. Angela liked that. By the end of the evening, we liked each other, too. That was almost 18 years ago. She was the first great writer I ever met, and she was one of the best, most loyal, most truth-telling, most inspiring friends anyone could ever have. I cannot bear it that she is dead.

—SALMAN RUSHDIE, “Angela Carter”

Opening with a question

When will international phone calls be free? Not anytime soon, bub. But . . . eventually . . . , they should be included in your rate plan. Which is weird, because it’s probably been a long time since you nervously eyed the clock while on the phone with your granny in Smallville. Long distance has been all-you-can-eat since cell phones and voice-over IP conquered the universe. But international telephony—whether landline, cellular, or Internet-based—is still a piggybank-rattling affair: Providers just can’t offer dirt-cheap calls across borders.

—CLIFF KUANG, “Burning Question”

Opening with a strong opinion

I have not always loved Dr. King. In the sixties I could not understand his reaching beyond race to stand on principle. I could not understand, or support, his own example of “nonviolence.” There was so much I didn’t know!

—June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die

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Concluding paragraphs

A good conclusion wraps up a piece of writing in a satisfying and memorable way. It reminds readers of the thesis of the essay and leaves them feeling that their expectations have been met. The concluding paragraph is also your last opportunity to get your message across.

A common strategy for concluding uses the specific-to-general pattern, often beginning with a restatement of the thesis (but not word for word) and moving to more general statements. The following paragraph moves in such a way, opening with a final point of comparison between Generals Grant and Lee, specifying it in several sentences, and then ending with a much more general statement:

Lastly, and perhaps greatest of all, there was the ability, at the end, to turn quickly from war to peace once the fighting was over. Out of the way these two men behaved at Appomattox came the possibility of a peace of reconciliation. It was a possibility not wholly realized, in the years to come, but which did, in the end, help the two sections to become one nation again . . . after a war whose bitterness might have seemed to make such a reunion wholly impossible. No part of either man’s life became him more than the part he played in this brief meeting in the McLean house at Appomattox. Their behavior there put all succeeding generations of Americans in their debt. Two great Americans, Grant and Lee—very different, yet under everything very much alike. Their encounter at Appomattox was one of the great moments of American history.

—BRUCE CATTON, “Grant and Lee: A Study in Contrasts”

Other effective strategies for concluding include using questions, quotations, vivid images, calls for action, or warnings.

Concluding with a question

The training students receive in reading is one of our oldest and most powerful experiences, the first mark of a capacity to perform in a literate culture. In the process of learning how to read, every literate person absorbs, at a young age, a broad and potentially confusing range of cultural, ethical, and social lessons. As much as gender, race, religion, class, or national identity, one’s literacy defines one’s place in society. But like these other givens, literacy need not mean only one thing. Just as one can be male, female, or transgendered, one race or multiracial, a member of more than one religious or ethnic identity, so also one can read in different ways. Why assume that literacy is the simple answer to a complex question?

—WYN KELLEY AND HENRY JENKINS, Reading in a Participatory Culture

Concluding with a quotation

Despite the celebrity that accrued to her and the air of awesomeness with which she was surrounded in her later years, Miss Keller retained an unaffected personality, certain that her optimistic attitude toward life was justified. “I believe that all through these dark and silent years God has been using my life for a purpose I do not know,” she said. “But one day I shall understand and then I will be satisfied.”

—ALDEN WHITMAN, “Helen Keller: June 27, 1880–June 1, 1968”

Concluding with a vivid image

At the time the Web was born, in the early 1990s, a popular trope was that a new generation of teenagers, reared in the conservative Reagan years, had turned out to be exceptionally bland. The members of “Generation X” were characterized as blank and inert. The anthropologist Steve Barnett saw in them the phenomenon of pattern exhaustion, in which a culture runs out of variations in their pottery and becomes less creative. A common rationalization in the fledgling world of digital culture back then was that we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm—or were already in the eye of one. But we were not passing through a momentary calm. We had, rather, entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will escape it only when we kill the hive.

—JARON LANIER, You Are Not a Gadget

Concluding with a call for action

Do we have cause for hope? Many of my friends are pessimistic when they contemplate the world’s growing population and human demands colliding with shrinking resources. But I draw hope from the knowledge that humanity’s biggest problems today are ones entirely of our own making. Asteroids hurtling at us beyond our control don’t figure high on our list of imminent dangers. To save ourselves, we don’t need new technology: we just need the political will to face up to our problems of population and the environment.

—JARED DIAMOND, “The Ends of the World as We Know Them”

Concluding with a warning

Because propaganda is so effective, it is important to track it down and understand how it is used. We may eventually agree with what the propagandist says because all propaganda isn’t necessarily bad; some advertising, for instance, urges us not to drive drunk, to have regular dental checkups, to contribute to the United Way. Even so, we must be aware that propaganda is being used. Otherwise, we will have consented to handing over our independence, our decision-making ability, and our brains.

—ANN MCCLINTOCK, “Propaganda Techniques in Today’s Advertising”

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Transitional paragraphs

To alert your readers to a major transition between ideas, you might use an entire short paragraph, as in the following example from a book on website design. The one-sentence transitional paragraph arrests our attention, announcing that the people who create websites expect certain responses from site users—but, as the next paragraph reveals, the users don’t often behave the way a site’s creator might hope.

When we’re creating sites, we act as though people are going to pore over each page, reading our finely crafted text, figuring out how we’ve organized things, and weighing their options before deciding which link to click.

What they actually do most of the time (if we’re lucky) is glance at each new page, scan some of the text, and click on the first link that catches their interest or vaguely resembles the thing they’re looking for. There are usually large parts of the page that they don’t even look at.

—STEVE KRUG, Don’t Make Me Think

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Dialogue paragraphs

Dialogue can add life to almost any sort of writing. To set up written dialogue, simply start a new paragraph each time the speaker changes, no matter how short each bit of conversation is:

Whenever I brought a book to the job, I wrapped it in newspaper—a habit that was to persist for years in other cities and under other circumstances. But some of the white men pried into my packages when I was absent and they questioned me.

“Boy, what are you reading those books for?”

“Oh, I don’t know, sir.”

“That’s deep stuff you’re reading, boy.”

“I’m just killing time, sir.”

“You’ll addle your brains if you don’t watch out.”

—RICHARD WRIGHT, Black Boy

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