ENGL&101 – English Composition I
Sample Introductions
Sample Introduction #1:
New York City was an adopted Mecca for the Beat Generation. None of the principle figures—
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady—were born there. To a man, they all
found their way to New York through a karmic combination of fate and desire. However, another
member of their group, poet Gregory Corso, had a jumpstart to the others: he was born in Greenwich
Village, New York City. It’s this fact, his native birth, that lends Corso’s writing about that city a more
natural feel than the others.
Green = Wide angle opening
Red = Transition sentence
Blue = Thesis statement
Sample Introduction #2
Chicanos in the United States are on the blunt end of the colonial hammer, pounded into the
uneasy shape of hybridity. Oppressed, humiliated, and dismissed, we are squeezed between the borders
of America and Mexico; English and Spanish; identity and diaspora. Chicana author Gloria Anzaldúa
recognizes and in many ways resents this reality. In her essay “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” she argues
that although cultures may live within certain geographic borders, language itself has few boundaries
and that history shows that even systematic attempts at eradicating a language never succeed at
destroying ethnicity. In fact, I believe language possesses the power to foster and protect identity.
Sample Introduction #3
The din of a cultural uprising reverberated throughout the 1920s as African-Americans in Harlem
embraced a voice of empowerment which spanned racial and geographic boundaries. And while the
dawn of this movement cannot be traced for certain, the years following the Great War brought with it a
light which shone brightly on art, literature, and philosophy. An era of prejudice began to fade and a
luminous fascination swept across the sea to Europe, especially the Parisian home of many American
Black expatriates. Archibald Motley was among this privileged minority. In his paintings he was able to
transcend adversity and see the parallels emerge between previously segregated societies; his paintings
preserve this period on canvases rich with color and life. One painting in particular—a bustling nightlife
composition entitled “The Jockey Club”—captures this essence without the more common bias of his
contemporaries, laying a bridge over the vastness of an ocean.