How Do You Write A Good Introduction To An Essay

The thesis is specific enough to fully explore the essay, but it's not so specific that there is nothing more to write about.After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, the debate surrounding racial profiling in airports intensified.Your introduction should introduce and set up your point, rather than lay out evidence to support it.

The thesis is specific enough to fully explore the essay, but it's not so specific that there is nothing more to write about.After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, the debate surrounding racial profiling in airports intensified.Your introduction should introduce and set up your point, rather than lay out evidence to support it.

Your introduction should tell the reader what to expect from your essay. Do not give very broad background information on the general topic, but focus instead on what is relevant to answering the set question.

There isn't one way to write an introduction, and following one particular structure could lead to your introductions becoming very formulaic.

All of these sentences build up to the essay's thesis statement.

Because it starts broad, and gradually narrows towards a focused, but not overly specific thesis.

For example, if you are arguing that smoking should be banned from all public places, you can start your introduction by referencing a statistic from a verified source: "Tobacco use kills more than five million people every year -- more than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, according to the World Health Organization." This strategy grabs the reader's attention while introducing the topic of the essay.

Providing readers with background on the topic allows them to better understand the issue being presented.The amount of detail that you can include in your introduction will depend on your word count.This is an example of a concise introduction: “Concern about racism in the police has increased since the 1980s.Soheila Battaglia is a published and award-winning author and filmmaker.She holds an MA in literary cultures from New York University and a BA in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley.Start your introduction with a sentence that gets the reader interested in the topic.To pique the reader's interest, you can begin with a quote, a personal story, a surprising statistic or an interesting question.Two significant inquiries, which were carried out in this period – the Scarman report and the Macpherson report – will provide a focus by which to critically analyse the concept of institutional racism in policing and evaluate policy responses.Whist some progress has been made since these two inquiries were carried out, many improvements still need to be made to overcome institutional racism.” Take a look at this detailed example of an introduction (PDF), which is broken down to show the purpose of each sentence within the introductory paragraph.The thesis statement should assert a position on a particular issue -- one that a reader can potentially argue against. For example, if a professor assigns the general topic of war, you can formulate the following thesis statement: "The United Nations must be redesigned because it is currently incapable of preventing wars." The rest of your essay serves to explain and provide evidence in support of your thesis statement.A good introduction should not be describing arguments or providing analysis that belong in the body paragraphs.