Expository Introductions

In order to help you flesh out your introduction and start your essay with a strong beginning follow the guidelines below.

A)  Hook: Write 1-3 sentences to catch the reader's attention and encourage him or her to read on.  You may do this by making a general statement about your big idea uniting the essay together, pose a question, make a controverisal statement, provide an anecdote that relates to your thesis or the situation in the story, provide a quote that is particularly relevant to your thesis, etc.

B)  Summary of the story:  Mention the author's(s') name(s) and the title(s) of the works you will be talking about in your essay.  Write a 2-3 sentence summary of the the story, or each story, that you will be analyzing in your essay.  Remember the following when writing titles of materials:

• Titles of complete works (e.g book, movie, CD title, newspaper, magazine, anthology, script, etc.) should be either underlined or italicized, not both.

• Titles of sections of a complete work (e.g. a chapter, a song, an article, a poem, a short story, a scene, etc.) should be identified by quotation marks around it.  For example in one of the anthologies we are using in class, Prentice Hall Literature we read the story "The Treasure of Lemon Brown" by Walter Dean Meyers.

C) Thesis Statement: This should be 1-2 sentences in which you state your main idea for the entire essay.