The Beginning

A series of articles on the basics of Academic Writing

Show your hand at the beginning to get your reader as a partner

If you've only got an hour to write an essay spend a half-hour on the first paragraph and thesis statement. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but not by much. The opening is a critically important part of the essays.

You can usually blame a bad essay on a bad
beginning.                        Sheridan Baker (1918-)

It's where your reader will meet your argument for the first time. It's your best (and often only) opportunity to lay out your argument, to give your reader a chance to see where you're going to try to take him. And it's reality check time for you: here's where all your grand visions for the essay start turning into reality. What you mention or don't mention in the beginning determines the main shape of your argument.

The opening paragraph

I find writing opening paragraphs very difficult, because I'm writing and thinking at two different levels. On one level, a deeper level of argument, I try to begin with the key facts I need to set up in order to engage my reader. That forces me to figure out what the key facts are. Names? Dates? Definitions? Context? Conventional scholarly opinion, which I'll either work within or react against? Particular scholar I'm drawing on? Key moment in a larger chain of events? Three main questions drive me:

1. What's my topic?
2. What's my thesis?
3. What do I need to tell my reader right away?

On a more superficial level, I also need to figure out exactly how to start. With a quotation? A question? An anecdote? A surprising finding? A paradox or puzzle? Whatever I choose, if I'm writing well it'll be in sync with the deeper level of thinking I'm working on – the particular detail, image, quotation or whatever else will fit with my thesis, my whole argument. For instance, if I'm writing about the fall from grace of many Internet dot-coms, I might start with a particular example – say Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, and I might choose as a starting point to make a sharp contrast between his zenith (Time's man of the year in 1999) and the subsequent swoon in Amazon's stock price (down by two-thirds in half a year as I write this).

An opening paragraph establishes a context for your exposition. If you are discussing an author, what is his or her full name? Is the time period you're discussing relevant? Is there a general scholarly tradition or conventional wisdom you're going to be working with, or reacting against? You don't need to cram every significant fact into the opening paragraph, but it's a natural place to put as much critical info as reasonably fits.

Here's an introductory paragraph that doesn't really clarify what the essay will be about. The writer was obviously looking for a way to start writing, and didn't cold-bloodedly ask herself, "What do I need to explain in order to make my argument?" After we read this paragraph, we have little idea what argument this essay will try to make:

Americans too often take their rights for granted. We hardly ever stop to think about all of the hard work that was involved in gaining the rights we enjoy under the Constitution. This Constitution was not ratified overnight. It took many years and a great amount of persuasion through a document called the Federalist papers to get the states to accept the Constitution. The Federalist papers were written by a group of men who were dedicated to the principles of the Constitution. They believed in the republican form of government, and did not trust democracy. The Federalists knew that under a democracy it is harder for a nation to include a large region of people in government assembly, and there is a greater risk that majorities and factions will form.

Is this essay about how difficult it was to ratify the Constitution? Is it about the anti-democratic views of the writers of the Federalist papers? Is it about the dangers of democracy? By the end, the paragraph seems to have moved past an introduction into a specific treatment of terms that haven't been defined yet, like faction, and some apparently important difference between democracy and the republican form of government. But we're not sure if our understanding of these things gibes with that of the author. And we still don't know what the argument is.

Here's an introductory paragraph that hasn't jelled:

Machiavelli incorporated many of his views towards religion into some of his works. There are three specific works, out of the many that he wrote, that deal specifically with Christianity. The three works, The Prince, The Discourses, and "The Golden Ass," each deal with various views he holds about modern religion. Machiavelli felt as though modern religion makes people weaker, is very political, and also causes people not to care for or defend their freedom.

At the end of the paragraph the writer delivers a thesis, but it's a grab-bag of ideas, not clearly connected to what's come before except in a very general way. The writer hasn't set up the thesis, told us how the things mentioned at the end relate to each other, or given us any sense of where the paper is going.

Here's an introductory paragraph that fails to give the reader a unified thesis. I've marked two possible theses:

In The Discourses, Machiavelli expresses strong feelings about Christianity. He says Christianity is weak because it does not practice the art of war. Any religion that does not practice the art of war is not destined to survive. Machiavelli believes that Christianity does not favour freedom, makes people slothful, and was unsuccessful in wiping out older religions.

All of the things the writer says here may well be true. But they're not organized in any helpful way. First one sentence comes at us like a thesis. The next sentence supports our understanding of this as the thesis. But then we get to the last sentence, which suddenly asserts itself as the "real" thesis. But this would-be thesis mentions three things, none of them obviously connected to the previous two sentences (except that they share a single topic, Christianity). The middle part of the paragraph, in other words, doesn't prepare us for the thesis. So where's the thesis? More plainly, what exactly is this writer trying to say? She has nailed down the topic: Machiavelli's attitude toward Christianity. But she has failed to deliver a focused thesis. (The solution, incidentally, may well lie in integrating these various specific points into a general observation on Machiavelli's view of Christianity – but that will require additional thinking, not just jiggering with the opening paragraph.)

A last point on first paragraphs: sometimes a writer, feeling that the opening must sound like an opening, writes something formal, impersonal, and inert. Even strong writers fall into this trap. The following example is from an essay that on the whole was full of strong verbs and good, strong writing. The writer, concerned to establish a formal tone at the beginning, wrote a passage chock full of nominalizations and weak verbs:

The thesis statement

A topic is something you want to talk about: the environment, or censorship of the arts, or wealth and poverty in America. A thesis, by contrast, is an argument, generally reduced down to one sentence. Many students think that all they have to do to get an essay off the ground is state the topic. For instance: A key issue in America today is wealth and poverty. But that is not enough. Two essays can have the same topic but make opposite arguments (the thesis statements are italicized):

Topic: wealth and poverty in America

A strong thesis makes writing the whole essay easier, because it helps you see how the whole argument should be organized. Yet again and again students turn in essays with weak or absent or confusing theses. That's like starting a trip without a clear sense of where you're going. My advice to students is simple: Start with a good thesis, and build on it. Before you get too far in writing the essay, find the thesis statement in the introductory paragraph. Can't find it? Problem. Stop, think, and come up with one. And, as you write, constantly check what you're writing against your thesis sentence. Are you still on track? If not, what went wrong? Do you need to refocus your writing, or revise your thesis? Writing is one of the best ways to think, so don't be too convinced that the thesis you began with is the one you should end up with once you've written a draft of your essay.

Okay, how do you come up with a good thesis? First of all by remembering that a thesis should capture your whole argument in one sentence. Here is a thesis that doesn't work well, because the writer wasn't really thinking of it as a developed argument. And reading it, we are unsure of what the argument is:

In the Federalist papers, the authors play off of two aspects of human nature, conflict and imperfection.

This is one of those theses that sounds good at first but needs more work. What does play off of mean? And are conflict and imperfection simply two things the student's paper will discuss, or are they meant to be understood as connected in some fashion? This student succeeds in telling us what she will write about (her topic), but she doesn't succeed in telling us what argument she's going to make.

Here is how the student ultimately revised her thesis, in a way that makes her argument clear:

The authors of the Federalist papers saw human nature as marked by conflict and fallibility.

Here is another example of an unclear or unformed thesis:

There is a common theme between Federalist essays #10 and #51: power.

All we have at this point is a topic. This writer has told us what she's going to write about, but not what her argument is. What do Federalist #10 and #51 say about power? Do they condemn or praise it? Do they propose to encourage or restrict power? Whose power are we talking about? And do these two Federalist papers make similar arguments about power, or do they merely share it as a topic? Here is one revision:

Federalist #10 and #51 both see conflict as the gravest danger to popular government. But instead of trying to eliminate conflict, they propose to harness its force.

What happened to power? The writer thought about her argument and decided that conflict was a more precise term for what she wanted to talk about.

To have begun is to have done half the task; dare to be wise.                                Horace (65-8 BC)

Remember, your thesis is the most important sentence of the whole essay. It crystallizes your argument in a single statement.

Establishing the right tone

Besides clarity and good thesis statements, another important aspect of beginnings is establishing the right tone. Many essays founder not because of what they say but how they say it.

Student writers, in particular, often believe the best way to make an argument is to make it as strongly as possible. This is particularly common with essay assignments that invite some degree of personal reaction. But remember that the whole point of argument is to convince people who don't agree with you, and the best way to do that is to make them willing to listen to you. Especially at the beginning of an essay, you should strive to find common ground with opposing views. Even if you plan to end up with a strong argument, the beginning is a time for moderation, for a reasonable, open-minded tone that promises honest consideration of a question. A couple of examples:

The point is not whether the original passage is utterly wrong, but that it will fail to convince anyone. It will simply reinforce the convictions of those who already agree, and induce those who disagree to tune out. Note that both these passages may well end up with essentially the same argument, an attack on school choice – but the revision is likely to be much more persuasive to readers, by virtue of how it frames the question at the start.

Next: The middle

Adapted from: The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing by
Professor Michael Harvey, Washington College

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