creating great essays

How To Create A Catchy Introduction To Your Essay

They say well begun is half done. It is particularly true in case of college essays. If you write a good introduction, then it can pick the interest of the reader in your essay. At the same time if you do a sloppy job in introduction then the reader can very quickly lose interest.

To write a good introduction one can take advantage of certain psychological tendencies of the human mind. The human mind is wired to be rationalizing rather than rational and it plays tricks on the self.

The tricks work because human beings are not aware of it. In fact, the tendency to rationalize and mislead the self are so strong that even if a person is aware of it, he will still fall for them. Most people’s happiness depends on living in some delusional bubble and they cannot handle reality and rationality.

The following tricks can be used to write a good and catchy introduction:

  1. Social Proof – human beings seek comforts in numbers. They believe that if a lot of people are doing something then it must be right. You can take advantage of this tendency and cite data such as so many people like such and such thing
  2. Endowment effect – human beings are hard wired to like things that they own, more than their actual worth. So you can praise the alma mater of the reader to gain brownie points
  3. Authority- human beings are hard wired to like the authority figures, they tend to take their words seriously, so you can quote that the following authority figure said this or that
  4. Similar others – human beings are wired to have a positive bias for people similar to themselves, so you can mention works of other academics
  5. Reason respecting tendency – human beings are wired to accept reasons even if the reasons do not make much sense, so just add because in your introduction

These simple tricks would help you to write a catchy paper. Also remember that in an introduction to an essay do not try to make a very strong rational argument, rather try to make an argument that evokes strong feelings in the reader. Rational argument should be made in the rest of the paper, but to catch attention cite some facts or data that provoke strong reaction of positive or negative feelings.

 

 
 

Copyright © BlackCulturalStudies.org.