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The Best Opening Sentence for Your Essays

The Best Opening Sentence for Your Essays
Common advice for writing the opening sentence for an academic essay includes everything from a "reverse triangle" structure where the introductory paragraph begins broadly and then narrows down to the thesis statement, to opening with "a hook" to grip your reader and pull them in.

While many of the bits of advice you will run into along the way for what constitutes a good opening sentence for your essays may be subjective and dependent up on the specific field and other subjective factors, there are some guidelines that you can follow no matter what to get the best opening sentence for your essays. They include:
Be Precise
Include your Topic
Identify your Focus
Now how you go about doing these three things will be dependent on your own particular style and the expectations of your instructors or professors, but no matter what field, if you make sure that your opening sentence has these three components, then you can't go wrong!

1. Be Precise
Precision is key. 

Great! But what does that really mean? 

Often what it means is that you first have to write a broad sentence or a broad few sentences to warm yourself up to the writing. And then once you've narrowed things down a bit, delete the first part if it rambles. 

For example, let's say that you are writing about bike lanes on city streets you may begin your first draft with something like:

Since humans have begun to live in communities, there have long been questions about safety. With the industrial revolution and the introduction of cars onto city streets, there have been questions about how to keep everyone safe as congestion increases. Today cities are full of various types of transportation, but bikes and cars are not separated on roads the way streetcars or dedicated bus lanes operate separately from cars.

Once you look at that closely, you see that the first sentence - "Since humans have begun to live in communities, there have long been questions about safety" - doesn't add much. It's a broad truism that can be deleted outright. (It also employs passive tense construction, and, therefore, is particularly weak as an opening.)

Then look at the second sentence - "With the industrial revolution and the introduction of cars onto city streets, there have been questions about how to keep everyone safe as congestion increases" - and it again uses a passive construction ("there have been questions..."), which is rather weak, but it also remains rather broad and sweeping.

The third sentence - "Today cities are full of various types of transportation, but bikes and cars are not separated on roads the way streetcars or dedicated bus lanes operate separately from cars" - focuses us in with precision:
when - "today"
where - "cities"
what - "transportation," "bikes and cars are not separated"
The more who, what, when, where, why questions you can answer in your first sentence the more precise that sentence is. So for the example above, delete sentences #1 and #2 and jump right in with the third one as the first one!

2. Include Your Topic
If you have been given a specific essay question or topic, or you have chosen your own topic, you want to make sure that you integrate that topic somewhere in your opening sentence.

For example, let's look at a sample essay question of the type that you might run into:

True democracy requires disagreement. Discuss.

The "topic" includes both "democracy" and the notion of "disagreement," so you want your first sentence to make sure that it includes both those terms. For instance, an opening sentence that just says "Democracy is important to the health of society" or "Disagreement is vital in contemporary life" are both passable openers, but they'd be improved if both elements of the topic were included. Something better might be:

Democracy is important to the health of society, and only through disagreement do we test the vitality and health of democracy.

Often a way to end up performing poorly on essay questions - either take-home essays or in-class essays - is to fail to answer the question properly by focusing on a tangentially related topic or idea rather than making sure to identify on the topic at the heart of the essay question.

3. Identify your Focus
Once you are sure that you've edited down your opening sentence so that it's precise and includes the main ideas as the topic of the question, you want to include something about how you will tackle the topic.

Your particular take on the topic is your focus. While your thesis statement that might come a little later in your introductory paragraph will be a fully fleshed articulation of your focus, your opening sentence should still include your focus so that any reader knows both your topic and focus as soon as possible. 

No one likes reading and reading and reading and reading and still not really knowing what the essay is about!

In the example above, the logical connection between democracy and disagreement is the focus: "only through disagreement do we test the vitality and health of a democracy." But let's say we have the same essay question, what are some other ways we could choose another focus in an opening sentence?

Democracy is about representing the diverse views of society, which can lead to productive disagreements.

This sentence still has both "democracy" and "disagreement" from the topic, but it suggests that "productive disagreements" are a part of expressing "diverse views" as the focus.

There are yet other ways we might focus in to tackle a question about democracy and disagreement.

In John Stuart Mill's essay "On Liberty" he suggests that only through disagreements will we either learn if we are in error or improve our position by defending it, which are crucial elements to freedom and democracy.

This opening sentence brings in previous literature as part of the way it grounds its focus on "disagreement" as a foundational element to both "freedom and democracy." 

For a third example on the same topic but with a slightly different focus, we could have an opening sentence something like the following:

The ultimate goal of the democratic process is to achieve consensus, and, therefore, while disagreements may be part of that process, the conclusion should be decisions that the majority of participants can agree with.

This opening sentence takes a different focus on the same topic (democracy and disagreement) from the two previous ones. This opening sentence suggests that the "democratic process" is about the aim "to achieve consensus" and therefore "disagreement" is only one step along the way towards agreement.

While each of these opening sentences for potential essays are on the same topic, the focus of each is vastly different.

So your opening sentence should be precise, include your topic, and identify your focus.

More resources on writing:
This Wize Blog designed to help you improve your writing instantly
Step by Step Guidance on Writing an Argumentative Essay
This YouTube Video by a Tenured Law Professor that explains college/university writing