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This post is adapted from a handout by Patricia Roberts-Miller.
A good introduction establishes clear expectations with the reader, identifying the topic and genre of the piece and reinforcing your ethos. When the reader finishes the introduction (which may or may not be one paragraph) he or she should have some clear indication of these three issues: what the paper will be about, what form the paper will take and its methodology (e.g., a policy proposal, a history, a literary interpretation, a comparison of various theories), and your ethos (well-read and fair-minded or closed-minded and sloppy? honest or dishonest?). In this post, I will outline the following strategies for writing introductions—summary, the funnel, a focusing incident, the thesis, the history of the controversy, and the some say/prolepsis.
Please note that some of these introduction strategies are not appropriate for this assignment. I am providing examples of them to help you identify these strategies and consciously apply the most effective one for your audience and purpose. Further, while the advice here is general, you can adapt it to the introduction to your multimodal analysis essay, and it will be useful in your other upcoming projects as well.
Summary
Odds are good that you already know how to do a summary introduction pretty well. This introduction is the “tell them what you’re gonna tell them” portion of the “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you’ve told them” formula that is often advocated in speech courses. The idea is that you should summarize the whole argument of the paper in capsule form in the first few paragraphs.
It is one thing to consider abandoning the use of gold stars and candy bars. But praise? All of us hunger for approval; many of us wish we had gotten a lot more praise (and a lot less criticism) as children. When the experts tell us to get in the habit of finding something about people’s behavior that we can support with positive comments, this strikes us intuitively as sound advice. So what could possibly be wrong with telling our children (or students or employees) that they’ve done a good job? In this chapter, building on what has gone before, I try to answer that question, arguing that we need to look carefully at why we praise, how we praise, and what effects praise has over time on those receiving it. I distinguish between various forms of positive feedback: on the one hand, straightforward information about how well someone has done at a task, or encouragement that leaves the recipient feeling a sense of self-determination; on the other hand, verbal rewards that feel controlling, make one dependent on someone else’s approval, and in general prove to be no less destructive than other extrinsic motivators. (Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards, p. 96)
Although this kind of introduction has its uses—it’s often effective in non-persuasive situations such as an essay exam in which the reader just wants to see that you’ve given the correct answer—it’s just one of many ways to begin a persuasive paper, and generally not the most effective. (In the example above, it is used at the beginning of a section, not the book as a whole.)
Funnel
The funnel introduction moves from abstract generalizations to the most specific statement, which is assumed to be the thesis statement.
People have always used different kinds of rewards. There are many kinds of rewards in the world. A bonus at work is obviously a reward, as is giving a child a chocolate bar to do her homework. Many people think that rewards are an effective way to change someone’s behavior, but others think that it is bad to give out rewards. But is a simple behavior like praising someone’s good work a reward that is bad?
Notice how vague and unfocused this sample paragraph is. In the first four sentences the author appears to be trying on and then abandoning three different approaches to the subject of rewards: proving the ubiquity of rewards as a means of behavior modification, giving a taxonomy of—classifying—different kinds of rewards, and deciding whether rewards are good or bad. None of these approaches is developed, and, at best, they are all only peripherally related to the thesis that the final sentence seems to be setting up, the question of whether or not praise is beneficial.
This is very much student writing (I couldn’t find a funnel example by a professional writer). Though funnels might show up in a professional writer’s early drafts, it is very unusual to see any non-student writing that uses this kind of introduction, for revision would narrow this list of options down to the one that the author wants to argue, eliminating divergent approaches and adding material to set up, build on, or establish the pertinence of the argument.
Focusing incident
Unlike the first two techniques, much published writing, especially journalism, relies on the focusing incident, a real or hypothetical example of the essay or article’s issue.
On December 7, 1991, Russian president Boris Yeltsin met with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus in a forest dacha outside the city of Brest. After two days of secret meetings, the leaders issued a declaration: “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, is ceasing its existence.” With that announcement Yeltsin and his colleagues sounded the final death knell for a centralized power structure that had ruled for nearly 75 years. In its place, the leaders established a coalition of independent republics, and they promised a radical decentralization of economic and political institutions.… Throughout the world, there is an unprecedented shift toward decentralization. The decentralization trend is evident in the ways that people organize countries and corporations, and in the ways people design new technologies. (Mitchel Resnick)
Most of the stories in magazines begin this way and for good reason: it’s effective. One reason for this effectiveness is that it focuses the attention of the reader and writer on something specific; it could almost be considered the opposite of the funnel. If well done, the focusing incident provides the reader with a vivid image of the issue. It also has the advantage of being highly portable. Many times a focusing incident can be used together with another introduction technique to provide a more complex and interesting prologue to a piece of writing.
Thesis introduction
Editorials sometimes use the thesis introduction, in which the first sentence is the author’s thesis. For example:
Fatal Attraction is a spellbinding psychological thriller, and could have been a great movie if the filmmakers had not thrown character and plausibility to the winds in the last act to give us their version of a grown-up Friday the 13th. (Roger Ebert)
The thesis introduction is generally not appropriate in academic writing (except exams), mainly because, in giving its conclusion first, it is usually not very persuasive. There is a reason that a well-respected reviewer like Ebert can get away with this kind of introduction, and that reason suggests that the thesis intro is not likely to be useful for you in your academic papers. Through his television show, which has made his thumbs film icons, and the fact that for almost thirty years he was the only film critic to have won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism—since he received his prize in 1975, there have only been two other film critics to take the honor: Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post (2003) and Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal (2005)—Ebert’s judgments about film are granted a lot of weight by most readers. His ethos is such that his opinions on movies are considered authoritative. Even this fact, however, does not allow him to make claims without supporting those claims with evidence, as these two examples show.
An effective use of the thesis introduction can be if said thesis is quirky or unexpected; in this case it can be attention-getting, prompting the reader to want to continue reading, even if only to see why the author would accept such a wild conclusion. In short, the thesis introduction is used mostly in situations where the author is not trying to persuade an informed and intelligent opposition audience but entertain an “in” audience, or where the author has other means of persuasion—a strong ethos in Ebert’s case—at his or her disposal.
History of the controversy
Probably the most common kind of introduction in academia is one that gives the history of the controversy in question. Scientific papers, for instance, begin by relating other studies on the same topic, philosophical essays begin by discussing the history of the issue, and even literary essays often begin by discussing the recent scholarship on the specific piece or topic.
On January 28, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded and seven astronauts died because two rubber O-rings leaked.… The immediate cause of the accident—an O-ring failure—was quickly obvious… But what are the general causes, the lessons of the accident? And what is the meaning of Challenger? Here we encounter diverse and divergent interpretations, as the facts of the accident are reworked into moral narratives. These allegories regularly advance claims for the special relevance of a distinct analytic approach or school of thought: if only the engineers and managers had the skills of field X, the argument implies, this terrible thing would not have happened. Or, further, the insights of X identify the deep cause of the failure. Thus, in management schools, the accident serves as a case study for reflections about groupthink, technical decision-making in the face of political pressure, and bureaucratic failures to communicate. For the authors of engineering textbooks and for the physicist Richard Feynman, the Challenger accident simply confirmed what they already knew: awful consequences result when heroic engineers are ignored by villainous administrators. In the field of statistics, the accident is evoked to demonstrate the importance of risk assessment, data graphs, fitting models to data, and requiring students of engineering to attend classes in statistics. For sociologists, the accident is a symptom of structural history, bureaucracy, and conformity to organizational norms. Taken in small doses, the assorted interpretations of the launch decision are plausible and rarely mutually exclusive. But when all these accounts are considered together, the accident appears thoroughly overdetermined. It is hard to reconcile the sense of inevitable disaster embodied in the cumulated literature of post-accident hindsight with the experiences of the first 24 shuttle launches, which were distinctly successful. (Edward Tufte, Visual Explanations, pp. 39–40)
(Notice how in this excerpt Tufte also provides a focusing incident—wholly appropriate in this case, since his chapter deals with the effects of a particular event—and combines other techniques of introduction together with the history of the controversy.)
Students should keep two things in mind when using this technique. First, in some situations it’s possible to discuss the history of the controversy for you personally or for the class—to begin by describing how the class discussion went, or how your own views evolved (a method which can be used to structure the entire paper).
Second, given that you have a limited amount of space and time to complete your papers, don’t try to start too far back on the history of the controversy. When this kind of introduction goes wrong, it turns into the “dawn of time” introduction, a particularly pernicious variation on the funnel. (“Since the dawn of time, people have been discussing spaceflight.”) Start your history where your audience and argument need it to start.
Some say/prolepsis
The some say or prolepsis introduction is a lot like the history of controversy introduction, except there is not an attempt to comprehensively summarize all opposing arguments; with a some say you only discuss a limited portion of the controversy—the side or sides with which you will take issue. Many times that means it is merely a presentation of the opposite point of view from your own.
In the previous chapters, I have discussed confusions that can be traced to academia’s ways of fogging over its conversations. Some observers, however, complain that what characterizes the academic scene is not “conversation” so much as smash-mouth combat. I have taken flak myself for arguing that conflict and controversy should be made more central in the curriculum. My critics object that today’s academia, like today’s popular media, is all too rife with conflict of a distinctly ugly and unedifying kind. The critics point to talk-show violence, political attack ads, and other signs of a pervasive “Gotcha!” spirit that aims at humiliating opponents rather than achieving consensus and cooperation. (Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academe, p. 83)
As a general rule, beginning a critique of an opposing argument with a fair and generous summary of that argument generates a tremendous amount of goodwill on your part with opposition readers. It shows that you are fair-minded and that you have listened. (If you take any management or interpersonal communications courses, you’ll find that scholars in those fields make a big point about beginning a discussion, especially a potentially heated one, by confirming what the other person has said.) In other words, it’s virtually the opposite of the summary introduction. Rather than begin by summarizing your argument, you begin by summarizing the argument of the opposition. Keep in mind that for this to work your summary has to be genuinely fair-minded—beginning by summarizing a biased or inaccurate version of your audience’s argument has a worse effect on your ethos than using one of the more simple introductions, because it makes you appear dishonest and unethical. A good rule of thumb for testing whether or not your summary summary of your opponent’s argument is fair is to ask yourself: Would the person I disagree with recognize my summary as accurately reflecting her/his point of view?
