Writer’s Workshop: Improving WT2 papers
(See back side for tips and guidelines for WT2 intros, with models)
Most of the intros I read could be more concise, muscular and precise about meaning. Here’s stylistic tool to use to
improve the opening of your intro:
Use active verbs in your opening sentence(s). Openings that use passive verbs of being (“is”) tend to state weak or
obvious ideas about the work. Active verbs produce leaner, more muscular writing and more precise ideas. An
additional benefit to using precise active verbs instead of weak passive verbs: The opening sentences tend to be
leaner, more muscular, more precise and concise. Also, go beyond summary of plot or facts about the work to begin
establishing your interpretation of meaning in the work.
Examples:
Verbs of being: “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost is a dramatic poem that recounts the story of two neighbors who every
year put together a wall made out of rocks to separate their two properties. Even though “Mending Wall”
is a poem, it was and still is easily understood by readers, as Frost is often known for his simple yet
reflective poetry.
Active verbs:
In her novel “Beloved,” Toni Morrison spins a harrowing tale of an African American family dealing with
slavery and oppression the late 1800s. Morrison pulls the reader forward and backward in time as she
tells the story of Sethe, a woman who murders her children to save them from a lifetime of slavery.
Notice what might happen with the first example if a more active verb and interpretive idea is used in the opening
sentences:
In his poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost questions the tendency of human beings to construct barriers between
themselves. Tension between the views of the speaker and his neighbor about the wall they are mending
energizes the poem and provokes the readers to decide for themselves what’s most important—human
connections or human privacy.
Writing: Go back into your intro and try to improve the openings by using precise, active verbs. Also, try to show
literary and interpretive understanding of the work, rather than simply summarizing plot or stating facts.
WT2 Intros: Stylistic tips and models

No need for a fancy hook. Dive right into the text and the question. Also, be sure to smoothly and efficiently
identify the title and author in the first sentence or two.

You don’t need to repeat the full question, but it should be clearly implied in the first or last sentence or two.

Show some insight about the text and its meaning from the outset. What kind of text is it? Hint quickly at
meaning you see in it.

Be sure to use active verbs in your opening sentence(s). Passive verbs constructions and verbs of being (“is”)
too often lead to weak ideas.

Don’t get caught up in plot summary; focus on a sentence or two of summary that may be useful in setting
up and supporting your thesis/interpretation.

Thesis: Though it may not appear in the form a single tidy sentence, you need a thesis clearly asserting your
interpretation of the text in response to the question you chose. It’s also good to show an awareness of key
craft moves for your organizing ideas.
Here are a couple of models:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” an early feminist tale of entrapment and madness,
speaks out loudly against the marginalization of women. And strangely, it does so through the silencing of its main
character, a wife whose husband has imposed rest and isolation on her as a cure for her “nervous depression.”
Locking her in the room with “Yellow Wallpaper” and trying to deny her the ability to write, the husband’s wellintentioned efforts to cure his wife only drive her more deeply into visions of women trapped within the patterns of
the horrid yellow wallpaper. She is driven to madness in her attempt to free herself from stifling prisons of
patriarchy. Through imagery, plot, and character, Perkins Gilman portrays what happens to women when forced to
accept the constraints that men and marriage place on them in this time period; their only options are insanity or
death.
In “The Country Doctor,” Franz Kafka twists the conventions of the short story into a nightmarish vision of
human inadequacy in a parasitic and irrational universe. Plot, character, setting, description, dialogue—all the
standard tools of narrative are there; however, all are projected through a strangely surrealistic lens. Plot and time
leap forward, then stall. Characters - human and animal - appear out of nowhere and behave in surrealistically
strange and contradictory ways. A wormy wound afflicts a patient and a children’s choir voices the parasitic demands
that society places on the doctor. The story spills out in one long, breathless paragraph. Kafka twists the art of the
short story into a particularly “Kafkaesque” vision of hopelessness and despair in order to demonstrate the limited
power of the individual to help others, or even oneself.