The attention grabber, also known as a “hook”, is the first sentence that the reader will see, and its
purpose is to grab the reader’s attention. A few common attention grabbers are:
- A short, meaningful quote that relates to your topic.
- Think of a quote that interested you during your research. What kinds of sentences
caught your attention?
- An interesting statistic about your topic.
- Was there a fact or statistic that surprised you while you were researching?
- A short, personal story related to your topic.
- This type of attention grabber is better for persuasive or personal essays. You could use
a small, interesting story to help the reader understand where you are coming from.
Keep in mind that the goal of an attention grabber is to convince the reader that your paper is worth
reading. An attention grabber plays a key part in the first part of an introduction and helps to serve as
a bridge to get the reader’s mind focused on whatever they are thinking about in the outside world, to
the topics introduced in the paper.
The introduction is a perfect place to establish any relevant context for the information in your essay.
You want the readers of your paper to have an idea about what you are going to spend the rest of the
essay explaining. This may include things like:
- Background information.
- Help ground the reader in the topic of your essay by providing relevant information such
as facts, statistics, or ideas. This will help put the reader into the right mindset before
getting into the heart of your paper so they can accept your thesis statement.
- Key Terms.
- It can be helpful to identify terms that may not be common knowledge to the reader in
your introduction. You do not need to identify all the terms used throughout your whole
paper in the introduction, as those can be identified as they come up in your paper.
Instead, focus on any words or ideas that are vital to the reader’s understanding of the
thesis.
Write Your Introduction 1
