Grabber Introduction ideas
Attention getter (choose one)
a. Question -- Begin with a rhetorical question that you are going to answer in your thesis.
i. Why are Americans spending billions and billions of dollars on dieting every year while
getting fatter and fatter?
ii. Why are jealous boyfriends more likely to cheat than boyfriends who are not jealous? Does
this make any sense. Yes, it does . .
iii. How would you feel if….?
iv. What would you do if……?
v. Do you think it is fair when….?
vi. "Is love simply a result of chemical reactions in our brains?"
b. Current Event -- Connect a current event to your topic
i. connect Octo-Mom to the subject of birth control or the ethical standards of fertility doctors
c. Quote – that has not been overused when it bears relevance to your essay's topic
i. George Bernard Shaw: "There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what one
wants. The second is getting it."
ii. Shakespeare said, “All’s fair in love and war.”
iii. “No man is an island.”
d. Shocking or controversial statement - This information must be true, verifiable, relevant to your
topic, but it doesn't need to be totally new to your readers. It could simply be a pertinent fact that
explicitly illustrates the point you wish to make. If you use a piece of startling information, follow it
with a sentence or two of elaboration.
i. "Many fools equate love with sex".
ii. "A Michigan museum recently paid $492,000 for an old, dilapidated bus from Montgomery,
Alabama."
iii. You might talk about how many foreclosures there are every hour
iv. How many people sign up on for Facebook every day
v. Have a minute? Good. Because that may be all it takes to save the life of a child—your child.
Accidents kill nearly 8000 children under age 15 each year. And for every fatality, 42 more
children are admitted to hospitals for treatment. Yet such deaths and injuries can be avoided
through these easy steps parents can take right now. You don't have a minute to lose.
vi. All prisoners condemned to life should be used for medical testing.
vii. Three headed baby born to German woman.
viii. "Love hurts"
ix. A duck’s quack doesn’t echo. Some people might find a deep and mysterious meaning in this
fact …
e. Anecdote - short one-page story that is relevant to your essay topic. Be sure your anecdote is short,
to the point, and, I repeat, relevant to your topic. This can be a very effective opener for your essay,
but use it carefully.
i. Last Tuesday a man was walking down the street during rush hour in New York City…….
ii. Every Saturday the old man went into the same coffee shop and order the same breakfast as
the previous Saturday…
iii. Yesterday morning I watched as my older sister left for school with a bright white glob of
toothpaste gleaming on her chin. I felt no regret at all until she stepped onto the bus …
iv. Mike Cantlon remembers coming across his first auction ten years ago while cruising the
back roads of Wisconsin. He parked his car and wandered into the crowd, toward the
auctioneer's singsong chant and wafting smell of barbecued sandwiches. Hours later, Cantlon
emerged lugging a $22 beam drill-for constructing post-and-beam barns—and a passion for
auctions that has clung like a cocklebur on an old saddle blanket. "It's an addiction," says
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
k.
l.
Cantlon, a financial planner and one of the growing number of auction fanatics for whom
Saturdays will never be the same.
Fact or statistic
i. Sixty-five percent of all prisoners will be jailed at least one more time after they are released.
ii. More women than men attend college
National Obsession -- Seize upon a national obsession and connect it to your topic.
i. Octo-Mom
ii. lies of Alex Rodriguez regarding his steroid use
iii. pandemic of foreclosures and their effect on families
iv. devastation of unemployment
Definition – NOT the best option, though!!!!!!!
i. Webster defines privacy as….
ii. The definition of insane is best taken from Merrian Webster who says…..
iii. A homograph is a word with two or more pronunciations. Produce is one example …
Famous Person - People like to know what celebrities say and do. Dropping the name of a famous
person at the beginning of a paper usually gets the reader's attention. It may be something that
person said or something he or she did that can be presented as an interest grabber. You may just
mention the famous person's name to get the reader's interest. The famous person may be dead or
alive. The famous person may be a good person like the Pope, or he or she may be a bad person like
John Wilkes Booth. Of course, bringing up this person's name must be relevant to the topic. Even
though the statement or action may not be readily relevant, a clever writer can convince the reader
that it is relevant.
i. The most widely read writer in America today is not Stephen King, Michael Crichton or John
Grisham. It's Margaret Milner Richardson, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue
Service, whose name appears on the "1040 Forms and Instructions" booklet. I doubt that
Margaret wrote the entire 1040 pamphlet, but the annual introductory letter, "A Note from
the Commissioner," bears her signature.
Dialogue -- An appropriate dialogue does not have to identify the speakers, but the reader must
understand the point you are trying to convey. Use only two or three exchanges between speakers to
make your point. Follow dialogue with a sentence or two of elaboration.
Historical review -- Some topics are better understood if a brief historical review of the topic is
presented to lead into the discussion of the moment. Such topics might include "a biographical
sketch of a war hero," "an upcoming execution of a convicted criminal," or "drugs and the younger
generation." It is important that the historical review be brief so that it does not take over the paper.
i. from "Integration Turns 40" by Juan Williams in Modern Maturity, April/May, 1994. “The
victory brought pure elation and joy. It was May 1954, just days after the Supreme Court's
landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. At NAACP
headquarters in New York the mood was euphoric. Telegrams of congratulations poured in
from around the world; reporters and well-wishers crowded the halls.
Declarative -- This technique is quite commonly used, but it must be carefully used or the writer
defeats his whole purpose of using one of these patterns, to get the reader's interest. In this pattern,
the writer simply states straight out what the topic of his paper is going to be about. It is the
technique that most student writers use with only modest success most of the time, but good
professional writers use it too.
i. from "The Tuition Tap" by Tim Lindemuth in K-Stater, February, 1994. In the College of
Veterinary Medicine and Engineering, for example, nearly one-third of the teaching faculty
may retire by the year 2004. In the College of Education, more than a third of the professors
are 55 years old and older. The largest turnover for a single department is projected to be in
geology. More than half of its faculty this year are in the age group that will retire at the
millennium, says Ron Downey of K-State's Office of Institutional Research and Analysis.
The graying of K-State's faculty is not unique. A Regents' report shows approximately 27
percent of the faculty at the six state universities will retire by the end of this decade, creating
a shortage of senior faculty.
m. Analogy -- or extended comparison to clarify a point that is important to your argument
i. A man we’ll call Hank wants to marry his girlfriend, not because he is necessarily ready for
marriage or because he is head over heels with his fiance, but because he has good reason to
believe that during his wild single years he ticked off just about every other woman on the
planet. But is this an admirable motivation for getting married and will such a desperate
impulse result in a successful marriage? The short answer is yes.
Hank’s marriage will work because he is a contrite realist who knows that for men like
himself marriage is a sort of Witness Protection Program. It is a point of fact that Hank has
offended 99% of the female race with his pestilent, cheating, lying, BS-ing, emotionally
retarded existence, so that marriage is the last sanctuary for this morally depraved man who has
stepped on so many women’s toes that he is, understandably, a marked man, his face stapled to
every telephone pole in the country with the words, “CAUTION:THIS MAN IS POISON TO
THE WOMEN ON PLANET EARTH.”
Let us bear in mind, therefore, that Hank is not so much getting married as much as he is
enlisting in a “witness protection program” to insulate himself from all the women who,
justifiably, want to kill him.
My analogy between Hank’s marriage and a witness protection program is further developed
when we see that for bums like Hank marriage is his last chance at earning public
respectability because he is, as a married man, proclaiming to the world that he has voluntarily
shackled himself to the chains of domesticity in order that he may be spared greater
punishments, the bulk of which will be exacted upon him by the women whom he used and
manipulated for so many years.
Because it is assumed that Hank’s stalwart, gimlet-eyed wife will keep him in check, she will
become, in a way, equivalent to the ankle bracelet transmitters worn by parolees who are only
allowed to travel within certain parameters. Marriage will anchor Hank close to the home and,
combined with his wife’s reliable issuing of house chores and other domestic duties, Hank will
be rendered safely tethered to his “home base” where his wife can observe him sharply to make
sure he continues his penance and doesn’t backslide into the abhorrent behavior of his past
single life.
The success of Hank’s marriage is not rooted in “love,” as Stephanie Coontz so convincingly
shows in her masterful essay “The Radical Idea of Marrying for Love.” Rather, Hank’s
successful marriage is rooted in his understanding that marriage, for him at least, is The Final
Fortress of the Scoundrel. Knowing exactly what his marriage is and what his humble role is in
the marriage will insure a far more successful, long-lasting marriage than the capricious “love”
described in Coontz’s essay because ______________________________,
________________________________, ________________________________, and
__________________________________.