Step 5: Write Your Opening

One of the most difficult parts of writing any piece is how to start. Think of your opening as having three parts:

  1. The hook

  2. Context

  3. Your claim or thesis

The Hook

Regardless of who the members of your audience are, they have a lot of demands on their time and a lot of options for what to read. You have to make them want to read your piece. So, begin your argument by “hooking” your readers with some kind of attention grabber. This might be a shocking fact, a startling statistic, a profound personal story, or any number of other things. Whatever it takes to draw your readers in. If you think back to the rhetorical appeals discussed in Chapter 3, you can see that a successful hook often relies on an appeal to pathos—emotion. Pathos is the spice of an argument. It makes it interesting, gives it flavor, but should be used sparingly. The hook is a great place to use it.

Take a look at how Martin Luther King Jr. uses pathos to establish both the danger and the epic historical nature of an important moment in Memphis:

Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?” I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there.

ACTIVITY

Try beginning your argument by writing a few sentences that appeal to pathos:

  • Tell a brief emotional story that relates in some way to your claim.

  • Write the most shocking idea that you uncovered in your research on your question.

  • Present the most startling statistic about your topic.

406

The Context

Another thing to think about when starting your argument is how much background you need to provide for your audience. If you are making an argument, for example, that a Mac computer is a better choice than a PC for gamers because of the graphics and processing speed, you will have to ask yourself whether your audience has enough technological knowledge to understand a sentence like: “The MacBook Pro has a 2.2GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor (Turbo Boost up to 3.4GHz) with 6MB shared L3 cache.” If the members of your audience do not have some technological knowledge, you may need to explain some of these terms and the effect they have on the gaming experience. If your audience does not understand the context of your argument, you have little chance of persuading it of your claim. The amount of context you will need to include will vary based on the complexity of the issue or the specificity of the evidence you will likely use.

When Yousafzai spoke at the United Nations in 2013, her story was well known to all or most of her audience, but she still offered some context for her argument by saying, “Dear Friends, on the 9th of October 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my forehead. They shot my friends too.” This information is key to understanding her argument.

ACTIVITY

Write a draft of your introductory paragraph by putting together the following components:

  1. Your hook (ethos, logos, or pathos)

  2. Appropriate and necessary context—the background information your audience will need to understand what follows

  3. Your claim