Introduction Paragraphs

Your introduction paragraph should grab your reader's attention, introduce the topic of your essay, and present your thesis.

Grab the reader's attention 

The very first sentence of your introduction should get your reader interested in your topic. Don't start out too generally in your introduction paragraph. Also, don't state all of your specific main points individually in the introduction.

Introduce the topic through background information

Focus on giving background information that your reader needs to understand the topic generally. The middle sentences of your introduction paragraph prepare your reader to understand your thesis statement. 

To know what background information you should include, you need to consider your audience. Are you writing an essay about electromagnetism for a scientific journal that will be read by other scientists in your field?   Are you writing a piece for a local newspaper about the effects of a recent local government policy change for the general public who don't know anything about the policy that was changed? Are you writing an essay analyzing poetry for your college English teacher?

You need to know who your audience is before you can start guessing what background information they already know and what background information you need to tell them for them to understand your thesis statement later. Fellow scientists might not need basic scientific words defined. However, they may need specific science concepts that few people are experts in explained and recent research about the topic reviewed to bring them up to date before they read your thesis statement. The average people of a town would probably need the new government policy defined and explained. If you tried to explain the effects of the policy when they don't even know what the policy is, they would be confused. Background information introduces the topic of the essay and prepares the reader to understand your main idea about that topic (your thesis statement).

When you are writing for a teacher in a class, assume that you are writing for a general audience unless your professor tells you otherwise. Assume your audience knows general knowledge like "Fire is hot.", but doesn't know specific things like "The pronunciation of English words changed during The Great Vowel Shift of the late middle ages."  If you are not sure if a piece of information is general knowledge or specific knowledge, ask a friend who doesn't know about your topic to read your introduction. They can point out what information they don't understand as a general reader. Then, you can add background information about those points.

*Pro Tip: Never use the phrase "Everyone knows..." in the background knowledge section because you need to assume the general audience doesn't know most of the things about your topic. 

Present your thesis

The thesis states the main idea, or focus, of the essay.  The rest of the essay will give evidence and explanations that show why or how your thesis is true.

A thesis statement should be concise. It should say the whole main idea in as few words as possible. This makes for a more pleasant experience for the reader who might get tired or confused reading long, unnecessarily complex sentences. Some main ideas are very complex and may take multiple sentences to say clearly, but most can be said in just one sentence. Writing your main idea concisely is preferred in academic writing. This is why single-sentence thesis statements tend to be more powerful than thesis statements that are multiple sentences long. 

However, the thesis statement sentence still needs to be grammatically correct. One of the more common errors with student essay writing is comma splice sentences in the thesis statement. A comma splice sentence is a sentence that doesn't properly use conjunctions; it just tries to connect all the clauses with commas only which is grammatically incorrect. There are also other common grammar errors such as run-on sentences, incorrectly placed periods, and a lack of commas to watch out for. Thesis statements are often only a single sentence long, but due to the complex grammar and need for specific wording, they can take more time to write than other sentences. Thesis statements may also be revised multiple times to get the grammar and the wording just right to express your idea most clearly.

Exercises