How to begin: a dozen suggestions
- With an anecdote that leads into the main topic:
A student editor, criticizing the draft of a catalogue for
a new
college, three times deleted the words “liberal education” from the
draft. Coming upon it again, she circled the words and wrote
in the
margin: “What in the world is it?”
—Harris Wolfford, “In Search of Liberal Education”
- With the setting as background for what will follow:
Roman Wortman first decided to turn to organic farming one
day in the
spring of 1972, when he rode out on his tractor to spray
his fields
with a new pesticide and found that he was leaving a trail
of dead
birds behind him. “There was half a dozen of them
at the edge of the
field,” he told me as we stood under the blazing Nebraska
sun looking
over his cornfields. “I rode back into the yard and
there was more dead
birds along the driveway where I had sprayed only a half
hour before.”
He fixed his keen brown eyes on me for a moment. “I
turned around and
I said to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing out here?’ From that day to
this, I’ve never used another pesticide, herbicide,
or fertilizer on
this farm.” He waved his arm out over his fields of
corn and alfalfa,
which were shimmering with a bright, deep green. “Look
what I have to
show for it,” he said.
—William Tucker, “The Next American Dust Bowl… and How to Avert It”
- With narration, beginning in the middle of things, inviting
further
reading:
You wake up one morning with a vague sense of unease. Everything
seems
normal—until you move. And then, brother, you scream.
A demon seems to
be stabbing at the base of your big toe with a sharp, red-hot
poker.
Even the light touch of the sheet gouges your nerves. Carefully,
delicately, you remove the bedclothes and examine the shiny
red
swelling at the tender joint. Try to wiggle the toe—and
scream again.
Cautiously swing your legs to the floor and the whole foot
throbs in
agony. Wondering how you broke your toe, you limp into your
doctor’s
office and get the news, as I did a few years ago: No broken
bones, my
friend; it’s the gout.
—Rafael Steingberg, “If You Are Highly Sexed,
Achievement Oriented, and
a Wine Connoisseur, This May Be Your Disease”
- With a quotation relevant to the thought:
“Yes, we are revolutionaries,” acknowledged
the fortyish executive, a
top salesman for one of America’s largest and fastest-growing
corporations. “What we are doing will no doubt leave
a very lasting
impression on America. We are going to turn the world of
white-collar
work upside down, inside out, and make it do what it’s
supposed to
do—work.”
No small boast, that. But this man, who prefers to be an
anonymous
revolutionary, speaks confidently, for he has seen a vision
of the
future—and it is electronic.
—Jon Stewart, “Computer Shock: The Inhuman Office
of the Future”
- With a firm statement of opinion, arousing the reader’s
feelings:
The first year of the 1980’s may or may not bring
a new president to
the White House, but it will, for certain, see a new incumbent
in a
high artistic post that has had a lot less changes over
seven decades.
After all those years in which the direction of the great
Philadelphia
Orchestra has been in the hands of only two men (Leopold
Stokowski and
Eugene Ormandy), it will pass to Riccardo Muti. This move
is somewhat
like elevating a parish priest to the papacy.
—Irving Kolodin, “Music to My Ears: Provincialism
on the Podium”
- With a prediction:
America is facing a manpower crisis of awesome and dangerous
proportions. What is done, or not done, about it in the next
few years
will affect the quality of life in this country for generations.
Nor
is it any exaggeration to say that if the correct solutions
for the
problem are not conceived and carried out, the United States
will be
confronted with potential disaster.
—John Tebbel, “People and Jobs"
7. With unusual or sensational detail:
Physicians may one day treat patients who have shattered
limbs,
crippled joints, and injured spines in a way that man never
before
dared to dream of: regrowing the damaged part—whole,
perfect, and
undiseased.
—Susan Schiefelbein, “The Miracle of Regeneration:
Can Human Limbs Grow
Back?”
8. With a series of reflective questions:
If, indeed, it is true that taxes are as inevitable as death,
what
considerations determine whether we must pay more or less?
Isn’t it
simply a matter of how much money “the government” needs to meet its
responsibilities to the people? Why can’t we take a
good, hard look at
what we want government to spend money on, set a price tag
for these
services, and then collect the money deemed necessary according
to an
ability-to-pay formula, or on some other equitable basis?
Wouldn’t
this be a great deal simpler than our present system of exemptions,
deductions, write-offs, and a thousand and one other opportunities
for
maneuvers that have made a national pastime of searching for “tax
angles”? In other words, once we have agreed that, in
one way or
another, government must collect the tax revenue it needs
to stay in
business, doesn’t it all boil down to finding the fairest
means to
raise the money?
—Haig Babian, “Can Taxes Do More Than Raise Revenue?”
9. With a definition:
Overlive means that we have more than enough for everyone
but not
everyone gets his share. It’s as simple as that.
—Charles J. Calitri, “Everybody Wants In”
10. With a figure of speech:
Insomnia is my baby. We have been going steady for a good
twenty years
now, and there is no hint that the dull baggage is ready to
break off
the affair.
—Roger Angell, “Ainmosni”
11. With a play on words:
A sign over one section of the public library in my town
reads “Young
Adults Oversize.” Although it refers to books too large
for normal
shelving, it might also stand as a metaphor for the college
student who
has outgrown the limits of his own collection of textbooks
and
“favorite” authors, who seeks to pin down the
expanding world of ideas
into which he is moving to something solid and permanent.
—David Dempsey, “Seventh Amy Loveman Award”
12. With humor:
There’s good news in the paper. America has its first
drive-in funeral
parlor. I had almost given up hope that the country could
ever reach
the goal that it is so obviously striving for---the day when
we will be
able to do everything without getting out of the car. But
now I know
that the impossible dream is possible.
—William Zinsser, “Time-Saver for Busy Mourners”
Beginnings to avoid
Because the beginning is an important element in establishing
a good
relation between writer and reader, several kinds of beginning
are
therefore best avoided:
The apology, complaint, or personal dilemma:
I have now read “Love Among the Ruins” for the
third and, I hope, the
last time. I notice one element which is used sporadically
throughout
the story. The topic of which I am speaking is the use of
the word
“State” in the place of God’s name.
—Student theme
The panoramic beginning, typically a survey reaching back
to the dim
past:
War is a topic which has been handled admirably by poets
throughout the
course of history and man’s conscious destruction of
his fellow man.
Homer first described “man’s inhumanity to man” and the results that
war can have in his epic poem The Iliad. In the intervening
years, the
poet has continued to use war as the subject of his poetry,
for war
begets sorrow, and expressing emotion is the poet’s
stock in trade.
[Written as the opening of a theme asking the student to compare
two
contemporary war poems.]
The mystery opening, making the theme dependant upon material
from an
outside source known to the instructor but to no other reader:
The main thing that I noticed in the poem was the way the
tone changed
from stanza to stanza.
—Student theme
The overworked beginning:
In Book 1 of Gulliver’s Travels, Swift says…
Webster’s dictionary defines love as… [Definitions
are fine, but
original ones are often more meaningful than dictionary ones.]
The perfectly obvious statement:
Brave New World confronts man with a question that has in
the past and
will in the future most certainly be a human problem.
The utopian society has always been considered the ideal
society.
Gulliver’s Travels contains a very important thought
which everyone
should think about.
How to end: a dozen suggestions
Like the beginning of an essay, the ending may be thought
of primarily
in terms of structure or in terms of effect, but in either
case the
important thing about ending is to leave the reader with a
sense of
completeness. Isolated examples of final paragraphs demonstrate
very
little because as endings they can be judged only in terms
of what has
gone before. Characteristically, however, writers end in a
number of
different ways:
With a final paragraph or sentence that completes the logical
pattern
that the essay has been developing.
With a restatement of the main thesis.
With a concluding opinion supported by the preceding discussion.
With a speculative question or statement that leaves the subject
open
for further thought.
With musing on the border implications of the topic.
With a return to a question or image in the opening paragraph
so that
the essay is rounded out.
With an ironic twist or unexpected turn of thought.
With a note of high persuasion or challenge, comparable to
the
peroration of the classical oration.
With an appropriate anecdote.
With a telling quotation.
With descriptive passage, using the setting as a final commentary.
With a laugh.
Essentially, these devices for ending an essay correspond
to the kinds
of intonations that occur at the end of a sentence, either
falling,
rising, or level. Those endings that come to a logical conclusion,
just
as we intuitively know the end of a sentence, are falling.
Those that
end with a question or move to a persuasive climax are rising.
Those
that are reflective or leave the subject as an open question
tend to be
level because we are left to resolve the problem in our own
minds.
