connects the hook to the thesis statement
summarizes the overall claim of the paper
» Opening with a Story (Anecdote)
A good way of catching your reader’s attention is by sharing a story that sets up your paper. Sharing a story gives a paper a more personal feel and helps make your reader comfortable.
This example was borrowed from Jack Gannon’s The Week the World Heard Gallaudet (1989):
Astrid Goodstein, a Gallaudet faculty member, entered the beauty salon for her regular appointment, proudly wearing her DPN button. (“I was married to that button that week!” she later confided.) When Sandy, her regular hairdresser, saw the button, he spoke and gestured, “Never! Never! Never!” Offended, Astrid turned around and headed for the door but stopped short of leaving. She decided to keep her appointment, confessing later that at that moment, her sense of principles had lost out to her vanity. Later she realized that her hairdresser had thought she was pushing for a deaf U.S. President. Hook: a specific example or story that interests the reader and introduces the topic.
Transition: connects the hook to the thesis statement
Thesis: summarizes the overall claim of the paper
» Specific Detail Opening
Giving specific details about your subject appeals to your reader’s curiosity and helps establish a visual picture of what your paper is about.
Hands flying, green eyes flashing, and spittle spraying, Jenny howled at her younger sister Emma. People walked by, gawking at the spectacle as Jenny’s grunts emanated through the mall. Emma sucked at her thumb, trying to appear nonchalant. Jenny’s blond hair stood almost on end. Her hands seemed to fly so fast that her signs could barely be understood. Jenny was angry. Very angry. | a specific example or story that interests the reader and introduces the topic. connects the hook to the thesis statement summarizes the overall claim of the paper |
» Open with a Quotation
Another method of writing an introduction is to open with a quotation. This method makes your introduction more interactive and more appealing to your reader.
“People paid more attention to the way I talked than what I said!” exclaimed the woman from Brooklyn, New York, in the movie American Tongues. This young woman’s home dialect interferes with people taking her seriously because they see her as a New Yorker’s cartoonish stereotype. The effects on this woman indicate the widespread judgment that occurs about nonstandard dialects. People around America judge those with nonstandard dialects because of _____________ and _____________. This type of judgment can even cause some to be ashamed of or try to change their language identity.* | a specific example or story that interests the reader and introduces the topic. connects the hook to the thesis statement summarizes the overall claim of the paper |
» Open with an Interesting Statistic
Statistics that grab the reader help to make an effective introduction.
American Sign Language is the second most preferred foreign language in the United States. 50% of all deaf and hard of hearing people use American Sign Language (ASL).* ASL is beginning to be provided by the Foreign Language Departments of many universities and high schools around the nation. The statistics are not accurate. They were invented as an example. | a specific example or story that interests the reader and introduces the topic. connects the hook to the thesis statement summarizes the overall claim of the paper |
» Question Openings
Possibly the easiest opening is one that presents one or more questions to be answered in the paper. This is effective because questions are usually what the reader has in mind when he or she sees your topic.
Is ASL a language? Can ASL be written? Do you have to be born deaf to understand ASL completely? To answer these questions, one must first understand exactly what ASL is. In this paper, I attempt to explain this as well as answer my own questions. | a specific example or story that interests the reader and introduces the topic. connects the hook to the thesis statement summarizes the overall claim of the paper |
Source : *Writing an Introduction for a More Formal Essay. (2012). Retrieved April 25, 2012, from http://flightline.highline.edu/wswyt/Writing91/handouts/hook_trans_thesis.htm
The conclusion to any paper is the final impression that can be made. It is the last opportunity to get your point across to the reader and leave the reader feeling as if they learned something. Leaving a paper “dangling” without a proper conclusion can seriously devalue what was said in the body itself. Here are a few effective ways to conclude or close your paper. » Summary Closing Many times conclusions are simple re-statements of the thesis. Many times these conclusions are much like their introductions (see Thesis Statement Opening).
Because of a charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln and because of the work of two men, Amos Kendall and Edward Miner Gallaudet, Gallaudet University is what it is today – the place where people from all over the world can find information about deafness and deaf education. Gallaudet and the deaf community truly owe these three men for without them, we might still be “deaf and dumb.” |
» Close with a Logical Conclusion
This is a good closing for argumentative or opinion papers that present two or more sides of an issue. The conclusion drawn as a result of the research is presented here in the final paragraphs.
As one can see from reading the information presented, mainstreaming deaf students isn’t always as effective as educating them in a segregated classroom. Deaf students learn better on a more one-on-one basis like they can find in a school or program specially designed for them. Mainstreaming lacks such a design; deaf students get lost in the mainstream. |
» Real or Rhetorical Question Closings
This method of concluding a paper is one step short of giving a logical conclusion. Rather than handing the conclusion over, you can leave the reader with a question that causes him or her to draw his own conclusions.
Why, then, are schools for the deaf becoming a dying species? |
» Close with a Speculation or Opinion This is a good style for instances when the writer was unable to come up with an answer or a clear decision about whatever it was he or she was researching. For example:
Through all of my research, all of the people I interviewed, all of the institutions I visited, not one person could give me a clear-cut answer to my question. Can all deaf people be educated in the same manner? I couldn’t find the “right” answer. I hope you, the reader, will have better luck. |
» Close with a Recommendation
A good conclusion is when the writer suggests that the reader do something in the way of support for a cause or a plea for them to take action.
American Sign Language is a fast growing language in America. More and more universities and colleges are offering it as part of their curriculum and some are even requiring it as part of their program. This writer suggests that anyone who has a chance to learn this beautiful language should grab that opportunity. |
202-448-7036
Gallaudet University, chartered in 1864, is a private university for deaf and hard of hearing students.
Copyright © 2024 Gallaudet University. All rights reserved.
800 Florida Avenue NE, Washington, D.C. 20002
Introductions, thesis statements, and roadmaps - graduate writing center.
The first paragraph or two of any paper should be constructed with care, creating a path for both the writer and reader to follow. However, it is very common to adjust the introduction more than once over the course of drafting and revising your document. In fact, it is normal (and often very useful, or even essential!) to heavily revise your introduction after you've finished composing the paper, since that is most likely when you have the best grasp on what you've been aiming to say.
The introduction is your opportunity to efficiently establish for your reader the topic and significance of your discussion, the focused argument or claim you’ll make contained in your thesis statement, and a sense of how your presentation of information will proceed.
There are a few things to avoid in crafting good introductions. Steer clear of unnecessary length: you should be able to effectively introduce the critical elements of any project a page or less. Another pitfall to watch out for is providing excessive history or context before clearly stating your own purpose. Finally, don’t lose time stalling because you can't think of a good first line. A funny or dramatic opener for your paper (also known as “a hook”) can be a nice touch, but it is by no means a required element in a good academic paper.
This index makes findings topics easy and links to the most relevant page for each item. Please email us at [email protected] if we're missing something!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
What this handout is about.
This handout describes what a thesis statement is, how thesis statements work in your writing, and how you can craft or refine one for your draft.
Writing in college often takes the form of persuasion—convincing others that you have an interesting, logical point of view on the subject you are studying. Persuasion is a skill you practice regularly in your daily life. You persuade your roommate to clean up, your parents to let you borrow the car, your friend to vote for your favorite candidate or policy. In college, course assignments often ask you to make a persuasive case in writing. You are asked to convince your reader of your point of view. This form of persuasion, often called academic argument, follows a predictable pattern in writing. After a brief introduction of your topic, you state your point of view on the topic directly and often in one sentence. This sentence is the thesis statement, and it serves as a summary of the argument you’ll make in the rest of your paper.
A thesis statement:
If your assignment asks you to take a position or develop a claim about a subject, you may need to convey that position or claim in a thesis statement near the beginning of your draft. The assignment may not explicitly state that you need a thesis statement because your instructor may assume you will include one. When in doubt, ask your instructor if the assignment requires a thesis statement. When an assignment asks you to analyze, to interpret, to compare and contrast, to demonstrate cause and effect, or to take a stand on an issue, it is likely that you are being asked to develop a thesis and to support it persuasively. (Check out our handout on understanding assignments for more information.)
A thesis is the result of a lengthy thinking process. Formulating a thesis is not the first thing you do after reading an essay assignment. Before you develop an argument on any topic, you have to collect and organize evidence, look for possible relationships between known facts (such as surprising contrasts or similarities), and think about the significance of these relationships. Once you do this thinking, you will probably have a “working thesis” that presents a basic or main idea and an argument that you think you can support with evidence. Both the argument and your thesis are likely to need adjustment along the way.
Writers use all kinds of techniques to stimulate their thinking and to help them clarify relationships or comprehend the broader significance of a topic and arrive at a thesis statement. For more ideas on how to get started, see our handout on brainstorming .
If there’s time, run it by your instructor or make an appointment at the Writing Center to get some feedback. Even if you do not have time to get advice elsewhere, you can do some thesis evaluation of your own. When reviewing your first draft and its working thesis, ask yourself the following :
Suppose you are taking a course on contemporary communication, and the instructor hands out the following essay assignment: “Discuss the impact of social media on public awareness.” Looking back at your notes, you might start with this working thesis:
Social media impacts public awareness in both positive and negative ways.
You can use the questions above to help you revise this general statement into a stronger thesis.
After thinking about your answers to these questions, you decide to focus on the one impact you feel strongly about and have strong evidence for:
Because not every voice on social media is reliable, people have become much more critical consumers of information, and thus, more informed voters.
This version is a much stronger thesis! It answers the question, takes a specific position that others can challenge, and it gives a sense of why it matters.
Let’s try another. Suppose your literature professor hands out the following assignment in a class on the American novel: Write an analysis of some aspect of Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn. “This will be easy,” you think. “I loved Huckleberry Finn!” You grab a pad of paper and write:
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is a great American novel.
You begin to analyze your thesis:
Think about aspects of the novel that are important to its structure or meaning—for example, the role of storytelling, the contrasting scenes between the shore and the river, or the relationships between adults and children. Now you write:
In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain develops a contrast between life on the river and life on the shore.
After examining the evidence and considering your own insights, you write:
Through its contrasting river and shore scenes, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn suggests that to find the true expression of American democratic ideals, one must leave “civilized” society and go back to nature.
This final thesis statement presents an interpretation of a literary work based on an analysis of its content. Of course, for the essay itself to be successful, you must now present evidence from the novel that will convince the reader of your interpretation.
We consulted these works while writing this handout. This is not a comprehensive list of resources on the handout’s topic, and we encourage you to do your own research to find additional publications. Please do not use this list as a model for the format of your own reference list, as it may not match the citation style you are using. For guidance on formatting citations, please see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial . We revise these tips periodically and welcome feedback.
Anson, Chris M., and Robert A. Schwegler. 2010. The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers , 6th ed. New York: Longman.
Lunsford, Andrea A. 2015. The St. Martin’s Handbook , 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s.
Ramage, John D., John C. Bean, and June Johnson. 2018. The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing , 8th ed. New York: Pearson.
Ruszkiewicz, John J., Christy Friend, Daniel Seward, and Maxine Hairston. 2010. The Scott, Foresman Handbook for Writers , 9th ed. Boston: Pearson Education.
You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Make a Gift
University of Minnesota Crookston
Effective introductions and thesis statements, make them want to continue reading.
Writing an effective introduction is an art form. The introduction is the first thing that your reader sees. It is what invests the reader in your paper, and it should make them want to continue reading. You want to be creative and unique early on in your introduction; here are some strategies to help catch your reader’s attention:
Your introduction also needs to adequately explain the topic and organization of your paper.
Your thesis statement identifies the purpose of your paper. It also helps focus the reader on your central point. An effective thesis establishes a tone and a point of view for a given purpose and audience. Here are some important things to consider when constructing your thesis statement.
The thesis is often located in the middle or at the end of the introduction, but considerations about audience, purpose, and tone should always guide your decision about its placement.
Sometimes it’s helpful to wait to write the introduction until after you’ve written the essay’s body because, again, you want this to be one of the strongest parts of the paper.
Example of an introduction:
Innocent people murdered because of the hysteria of young girls! Many people believe that the young girls who accused citizens of Salem, Massachusetts of taking part in witchcraft were simply acting to punish their enemies. But recent evidence shows that the young girls may have been poisoned by a fungus called Ergot, which affects rye and wheat. The general public needs to learn about this possible cause for the hysteria that occurred in Salem so that society can better understand what happened in the past, how this event may change present opinion, and how the future might be changed by learning this new information.
By Rachel McCoppin, Ph.D. Last edited October 2016 by Allison Haas, M.A.
How to write the best hook for your essay: the definitive guide.
“Details matter. It’s worth waiting to get it right.” – Steve Jobs, founder of Apple
When you’re writing an essay—whether it’s narrative, descriptive, expository, or persuasive—it’s important to pay attention to details and get it right. That starts with the opening sentence.
From the very beginning of your piece, you need to pull in your reader . You can do this with an essay hook.
Composing a good essay might seem like a backwards process. First, write the essay or outline, then determine what hook makes the most sense to open your essay.
After that, write a few sentences for your introduction, and then close your first paragraph with a single thesis statement.
The hook is the opening statement of your essay. This might be a single sentence or a few sentences that grab the reader’s attention from the very beginning.
When considering how to compose a hook, think about the content of the essay. The hook is a strong start to your essay, and the rest of the essay should follow suit with clean, clear, and creative writing.
Also, keep in mind who will be reading your essay.
The hook is short but significant. Here is an example of a hook for someone writing about homelessness among college students:
“Fourteen percent of four-year college students are homeless, and 48 percent are house insecure, according to the Hope Center for College Community and Justice. Hopefully, I’ll be one of them.”
We’ve established that the essay hook is brief but powerful. The hook is not synonymous with the introduction, and should not replace it.
Where the hook is a succinct statement that draws in your reader, the introduction more formerly leads to your topic and purpose.
Creativity is an important component of your introduction, but the introduction more clearly states where you’ll take the reader through the rest of the essay.
Click above to watch a video on how to write a Hook.
This introduction adds to the hook previously mentioned:
“Rising tuition, poor financial aid packages, and too few affordable housing options have dramatically increased the percentage of homeless or house insecure college students in recent years. Students who work hard and want the opportunity to attend college are unable to afford shelter and food, often causing them to withdraw from school.”
By opening with the statistic hook and the follow-up statement, we know this student is homeless and plans to attend college. The hook grabs the reader’s attention.
In the next few sentences, the introduction provides the direction for the rest of the essay. There are several factors that lead to homelessness and home-insecurity among college students. These factors will be explored in the essay.
A thesis statement, typically situated at the end of the essay’s first paragraph, clearly states and summarizes the argument you are presenting on your essay topic. This will drive the rest of your paper.
Given the example above, here is a thesis statement to follow the hook and introduction:
“This needs to stop now. Our government must provide more realistic options and resources for motivated students to improve their situations with a college education.”
This thesis provides the writer’s point of view on the topic, and further sheds light on the angle of the essay.
When you compose your essay outline or complete the essay, you’ll have a better feel for what type of hook works best for your opening.
There are plenty of ideas to choose from. Here are some of our favorites:
Now that you’ve determined what type of hook you want to use, it’s time to find the right information.
If you’re considering opening with an anecdote , first think about what incredible personal stories you have tucked away that might provide a compelling start to your essay.
Oftentimes, a well-chosen quote will perfectly convey the point you want to get across at the very start. Use that quote to your advantage!
When using a question hook , think about a way to present your question in an intriguing and thought-provoking way.
There are great sources to search for statistics .
A declarative statement is a great hook to use in a persuasive essay.
How do i choose the right hook for my essay.
Choosing the best hook for your essay depends on the type of essay you are writing and the tone your essay will take.
There are dozens of different types of essays. We mentioned four of the most common essays at the start of the blog—narrative, descriptive, critical, and persuasive.
A narrative essay tells a true story in the first person. Because you are telling a story, an anecdote works well as your essay hook.
A descriptive essay works to help the reader visualize something through descriptive writing. Depending on the scene you are trying to set, or the tone of your essay, almost any hook can work.
An anecdote can quickly develop a setting, and a well-developed question will provoke the reader to stop and think. A great quote can frame your essay through someone else’s famous words, and strong statistics will provide an interesting or shocking statement that you can build from in your essay.
A critical or expository essay is an informative look at your topic. This essay relies on facts and analytics, so a statistical hook is a perfect opening.
Look at the information available on your topic, and choose the most interesting, unusual, shocking, or effective statistic to set up your essay. Always check for accuracy!
Many hooks also work well for persuasive essays , which work to build up the reasons the reader should take your position on the topic presented.
This should provide a smooth transition into the body of your persuasive essay.
You want to develop a strong start for your essay. To write the best hook, keep these tips in mind:
The top colleges and universities have become more selective than ever as acceptance rates continue to break records in recent years. What does this mean for you?
It means it’s important to stand ou t.
Your test scores, achievements, recommendations, and volunteer work are certainly important. But, where college admissions teams will truly see your personality and drive is in your college essay . And, even then, your essay has to make an impact from the start.
This is your chance to illustrate to colleges what you’re all about, and to show off your writing skills. Colleges and universities want to know you and what motivates you in your college essay.
It’s important to avoid formality and focus on creativity.
Save the formality for classroom writing, and spend your time developing a hook and introduction that makes your essay sing your unique song.
The hook for your college essay should be personal and creative to show the college of your choice what makes you stand out from the crowd.
Developing a great hook for your essay is as unique and creative as the writer and essay topic . Here are some examples of great hooks:
This is a short, personal story that introduces the writer’s experience in the Paralympics.
“At five years old, I lost my ability to walk after a freak accident attempting to ride my bike. You would think I’d never want to get on a bike again. But meeting the right person who helped me develop the right mindset led me to win a cycling event in the Paralympics.”
These are two very different quotes that could introduce an essay on evolution, depending on your thesis:
“Evolution is a theory, and it’s a theory that you can test. We’ve tested evolution in many ways. You can’t present good evidence that says evolution is not a fact.” Bill Nye the Science Guy “I’m all about evolution. I’m the first person to judge myself.” The Weeknd, singer/songwriter
Think about a question that can present your topic in a new light. If you’re writing an essay on the Civil War, for example, you could start with:
“What would our country look like today if the South won?”
That is certainly an interesting question to ponder, and it will grab the interest of your reader as they try to determine where the remainder of your essay will go.
Rhetorical questions also work well as an opening to an essay. Rhetorical questions can have obvious answers, or no clear answer. For example:
“Do you want to be successful?” (Rhetorical question with an obvious answer) “What is the meaning of life?” (Rhetorical question with no unanimous answer)
Both of these examples should pull the reader in by piquing their curiosity.
If you are writing an expository or persuasive essay on opioid use, many government sites or news articles provide excellent quotes:
“In 2017, more than 47,000 Americans died as a result of opioid use, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “In Pennsylvania alone, 29,610 doses of Naloxone were administered by EMS from January 2018 to December 2019.”
Now that we’ve covered the types of essay hooks, how to write them, where to look for sources, and tips to make your hook shine, it’s time to get writing!
Remember, you have lots of options to choose from. Be sure to check up on different sources before deciding on an interesting hook.
If you have any questions, let us know!
Click Here to Schedule a Free Consult!
Stay on track and ease your anxiety with our second-to-none college application assistance.
(732) 339-3835
Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.
Published on January 11, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on August 15, 2023 by Eoghan Ryan.
A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . It usually comes near the end of your introduction .
Your thesis will look a bit different depending on the type of essay you’re writing. But the thesis statement should always clearly state the main idea you want to get across. Everything else in your essay should relate back to this idea.
You can write your thesis statement by following four simple steps:
Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes
What is a thesis statement, placement of the thesis statement, step 1: start with a question, step 2: write your initial answer, step 3: develop your answer, step 4: refine your thesis statement, types of thesis statements, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about thesis statements.
A thesis statement summarizes the central points of your essay. It is a signpost telling the reader what the essay will argue and why.
The best thesis statements are:
The thesis statement generally appears at the end of your essay introduction or research paper introduction .
The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts and among young people more generally is hotly debated. For many who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education: the internet facilitates easier access to information, exposure to different perspectives, and a flexible learning environment for both students and teachers.
You should come up with an initial thesis, sometimes called a working thesis , early in the writing process . As soon as you’ve decided on your essay topic , you need to work out what you want to say about it—a clear thesis will give your essay direction and structure.
You might already have a question in your assignment, but if not, try to come up with your own. What would you like to find out or decide about your topic?
For example, you might ask:
After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process .
Professional editors proofread and edit your paper by focusing on:
See an example
Now you need to consider why this is your answer and how you will convince your reader to agree with you. As you read more about your topic and begin writing, your answer should get more detailed.
In your essay about the internet and education, the thesis states your position and sketches out the key arguments you’ll use to support it.
The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education because it facilitates easier access to information.
In your essay about braille, the thesis statement summarizes the key historical development that you’ll explain.
The invention of braille in the 19th century transformed the lives of blind people, allowing them to participate more actively in public life.
A strong thesis statement should tell the reader:
The final thesis statement doesn’t just state your position, but summarizes your overall argument or the entire topic you’re going to explain. To strengthen a weak thesis statement, it can help to consider the broader context of your topic.
These examples are more specific and show that you’ll explore your topic in depth.
Your thesis statement should match the goals of your essay, which vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing:
If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!
College essays
(AI) Tools
A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.
The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:
Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.
Follow these four steps to come up with a thesis statement :
The thesis statement should be placed at the end of your essay introduction .
If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.
McCombes, S. (2023, August 15). How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved June 19, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/thesis-statement/
Other students also liked, how to write an essay introduction | 4 steps & examples, how to write topic sentences | 4 steps, examples & purpose, academic paragraph structure | step-by-step guide & examples, get unlimited documents corrected.
✔ Free APA citation check included ✔ Unlimited document corrections ✔ Specialized in correcting academic texts
4-minute read
Never underestimate the power of an essay hook . This opening statement is meant to grab the reader’s attention and convince them to keep reading. But how do you write one that’ll pack a punch? In this article, we’ll break this down.
An essay hook is the first thing your audience will read. If it doesn’t hook them right off the bat, they might decide not to keep reading. It’s important that your opening statement is impactful while not being too wordy or presumptuous.
It’s also crucial that it clearly relates to your topic. You don’t want to mislead your readers into thinking your essay is about something it’s not. So, what kind of essay hook should you write? Here are seven ideas to choose from:
Everyone likes a good story. If an interesting story or anecdote relates to your essay topic, the hook is a great place to include it. For example:
The key to a good story hook is keeping it short and sweet. You’re not writing a novel in addition to an essay!
Another great essay hook idea is to lay out a compelling fact or statistic. For example:
There are a few things to keep in mind when doing this. Make sure it’s relevant to your topic, accurate, and something your audience will care about. And, of course, be sure to cite your sources properly.
If you want to get a little more creative with your essay hook, try using a metaphor or simile . A metaphor states that something is something else in a figurative sense, while a simile states that something is like something else.
Metaphors and similes are effective because they provide a visual for your readers, making them think about a concept in a different way. However, be careful not to make them too far-fetched or overly exaggerated.
Asking your audience a question is a great way to hook them. Not only does it make them think, but they’ll also want to keep reading because you will have sparked their curiosity. For example:
Subscribe to our newsletter and get writing tips from our editors straight to your inbox.
Try to avoid using questions that start with something along the lines of “Have you ever wondered…?” Instead, try to think of a question they may never have wondered about. And be sure not to answer it right away, at least not fully. Use your essay to do that!
Making a bold statement or declaring a strong opinion can immediately catch people’s attention. For example:
Regardless of whether your reader agrees with you, they’ll probably want to keep reading to find out how you will back up your claim. Just make sure your declaration isn’t too controversial, or you might scare readers away!
Laying out a common misconception is another useful way to hook your reader. For example:
If your readers don’t know that a common belief is actually a misconception, they’ll likely be interested in learning more. And if they are already aware, it’s probably a topic they’re interested in, so they’ll want to read more.
You can put your descriptive powers into action with your essay hook. Creating interesting or compelling imagery places your reader into a scene, making the words come alive.
A description can be something beautiful and appealing or emotionally charged and provoking. Either way, descriptive writing is a powerful way to immerse your audience and keep them reading.
When writing an essay, don’t skimp on the essay hook! The opening statement has the potential to convince your audience to hear what you have to say or to let them walk away. We hope our ideas have given you some inspiration.
And once you finish writing your essay, make sure to send it to our editors. We’ll check it for grammar, spelling, word choice, references, and more. Try it out for free today with a 500-word sample !
Post A New Comment
9-minute read
Is your content getting noticed? Capturing and maintaining an audience’s attention is a challenge when...
8-minute read
Are you looking to enhance engagement and captivate your audience through your professional documents? Interactive...
7-minute read
Voice search optimization is rapidly shaping the digital landscape, requiring content professionals to adapt their...
Are you a creative freelancer looking to make a lasting impression on potential clients or...
Effective professional communication is an important skill for contractors and freelancers navigating remote work environments....
3-minute read
Google Docs is a powerful collaborative tool, and mastering its features can significantly enhance your...
Twain High School
Thesis vs. hook.
In order to continue enjoying our site, we ask that you confirm your identity as a human. Thank you very much for your cooperation.
An eighth grader asked me for help writing a school-assigned essay. Her teacher had given the class a fill-in-the-blanks organizer. It was incredibly detailed. In the introduction area was a blank with the word “hook,” and below it another blank with the word “thesis.” For each of the two body paragraph areas were the words “citation, “explanation,” “citation,” and “explanation.” At the end was the word “conclusion.”
“I don’t buy it,” I said.
I asked her what she had written first, the hook quotation or the thesis. “The hook,” she said.
Of course. This student was making three mistakes that I see over and over in student essays.
First, she did not write the thesis first. In an essay, the most important sentence is the thesis. That is the first sentence to write. Every other sentence needs to support the ideas in that thesis sentence. If you don’t know what ideas are in the thesis, how can you write about them?
Second, she wrote the hook first, thinking (as her teachers may have told her) that the hook is where the essay begins. The hook is where the reader begins reading an essay. But it is not where the writer begins writing an essay. A good essay is thought though and written out of order. The proper sequence in which to write an essay (after you have organized it) is
The third mistake my student made was perhaps the most serious of all: she didn’t recognize that her chosen hook did not introduce the ideas of her thesis. She thought that her hook was so clever (and it was) that it didn’t matter if it was related to the ideas of her thesis. It does matter.
Over and over, I work with students who focus on the structure of an essay rather than the substance of the essay. Their essays are like Academy Award winning actresses in gorgeous gowns, sparkling jewelry, and splendid coifs whose speeches are either hollow or off-topic.
I asked my student to rewrite her hook. She did because she wants a good grade, and I’m a teacher, so I probably know what I am advising her. But I wonder if she understands that her original hook was irrelevant to the main idea of her essay.
Looking for a writing teacher for your child? Contact me through this website. I currently teach students in four states and one other country.
One-on-one online writing improvement for students of all ages.
As a professional writer and former certified middle and high school educator, I now teach writing skills online. I coach students of all ages on the practices of writing. Click on my photo for more details.
You may think revising means finding grammar and spelling mistakes when it really means rewriting—moving ideas around, adding more details, using specific verbs, varying your sentence structures and adding figurative language. Learn how to improve your writing with these rewriting ideas and more. Click on the photo For more details.
Comical stories, repetitive phrasing, and expressive illustrations engage early readers and build reading confidence. Each story includes easy to pronounce two-, three-, and four-letter words which follow the rules of phonics. The result is a fun reading experience leading to comprehension, recall, and stimulating discussion. Each story is true children’s literature with a beginning, a middle and an end. Each book also contains a "fun and games" activity section to further develop the beginning reader's learning experience.
Furia--Quick Study Guide is a nine-page text with detailed information on the setting; 17 characters; 10 themes; 8 places, teams, and motifs; and 15 direct quotes from the text. Teachers who have read the novel can months later come up to speed in five minutes by reading the study guide.
Follow blog via email.
Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
Email Address:
Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.
Thesis statements, claims, and evidence, introduction.
The three important parts of an argumentative essay are:
Each paragraph in the article is numbered at the beginning of the first sentence.
Identifying the Thesis Statement. Paragraph 2 ends with this thesis statement: “People’s prior convictions should not be held against them in their pursuit of higher learning.” It is a thesis statement for three reasons:
Finding Claims. A claim is statement that supports a thesis statement. Like a thesis, it is not a fact so it needs to be supported by evidence.
You have already identified the article’s thesis statement: “People’s prior convictions should not be held against them in their pursuit of higher learning.”
Like the thesis, a claim be an idea that the author believes to be true, but others may not agree. For this reason, a claim needs support.
Finding Evidence.
Paragraphs 5-7 offer one type of evidence to support the claim you identified in the last question. Reread paragraphs 5-7.
Finding Claims
Paragraph 8 makes two claims:
Finding Evidence
Paragraphs 8 and 9 include these statistics as evidence:
Question 3. Does this evidence support claim 1 from paragraph 8 (about the transformative power of education) or claim 2 (about the U.S.’s high incarceration rate)?
Question 4. Which word best describes this kind of evidence: A report, a study, personal experience of the author, statistics, or the opinion of an expert?
Remember that in paragraph 2, Andrisse writes that:
Now, review paragraphs 11-13 (Early life of crime). In these paragraphs, Andrisse shares more of his personal story.
Question 5. Do you think his personal story is evidence for statement 1 above, statement 2, both, or neither one?
Question 6. Is yes, which one(s)?
Question 7. Do you think his personal story is good evidence? Does it persuade you to agree with him?
Listed below are some claims that Andrisse makes in paragraph 14. Below each claim, please write the supporting evidence from paragraphs 15 and 16. If you can’t find any evidence, write “none.”
Claim: The more education a person has, the higher their income.
Claim: Similarly, the more education a person has, the less likely they are to return to prison.
Evaluating Evidence
In these paragraphs, Andrisse returns to his personal story. He explains how his father’s illness inspired him to become a doctor and shares that he was accepted to only one of six biomedical graduate programs.
Do you think that this part of Andrisse’s story serves as evidence (support) for any claims that you’ve identified so far? Or does it support his general thesis that “people’s prior convictions should not be held against them in pursuit of higher learning?” Please explain your answer.
Andrisse uses his personal experience to repeat a claim he makes in paragraph 3, that “more must be done to remove the various barriers that exist between formerly incarcerated individuals such as myself and higher education.”
To support this statement, he has to show that barriers exist. One barrier he identifies is the cost of college. He then explains the advantages of offering Pell grants to incarcerated people.
What evidence in paragraphs 21-23 support his claim about the success of Pell grants?
In this section, Andrisse argues that federal aid forms should not ask students about prior drug convictions. To support that claim, he includes a statistic about students who had to answer a similar question on their college application.
What statistic does he include?
In paragraph 25, he assumes that if a question about drug convictions discourages students from applying to college, it will probably also discourage them from applying for federal aid.
What do you think about this assumption? Do you think it’s reasonable or do you think Andrisse needs stronger evidence to show that federal aid forms should not ask students about prior drug convictions?
Supporting English Language Learners in First-Year College Composition Copyright © by Breana Bayraktar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.
WRITING TIPS
Writing the introductory paragraph
By PresenterMedia.com
Why are they important???
Four points it must accomplish…
THE HOOK SENTENCE - A writer may begin with…
THE LEAD OR HOOK SENTENCE
A literary quote
Such a hook for essay�may be perfect when you write about some particular author, story, literary�phenomenon, book, etc. Even if your essay is not fictional in nature, a�literary quote will make it sound more “alive” and “fresh” .
“So we beat on, boats�against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” These words of Nick�Carraway perfectly describe…”
“Not all those who�wander are lost.” And yes, indeed, every person is so…”
“When we love, we always�strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we�are, everything around us becomes better too.” Agree or not, but these words�from The Alchemist determine…”
Quotes of famous people
A person whom everybody knows may be more authoritative and influential than others; that is why writing a quote from his/her speech can be a really good essay hook.
“John Wooden once said, ‘Never mistake activity for achievement.'”
“Learn to laugh” is something my kindergarten teacher told me after Ralph Thorsen spilled paint on my daffodil picture.
Anecdote (for informal essays)
Do not be afraid of spoiling your essay with such an unusual hook. Even if you start writing with some humorous hook, it does not mean your essay will become a funny absurd at once. Some humor can help you grab readers’ attention and awake their interest to the topic.
“As my cousin and I pedaled our new bikes to the beach, 6 years old, suntanned and young, we met an old, shaggy-haired man weaving unsteadily on a battered old bike.”
“When I was a young boy, my father worked at a coal mine. For 27 years, he made it his occupation to scrape and claw and grunt his way into the bowels of the earth, searching for fuel. On April 19, 2004, the bowels of the earth clawed back.”
But remember, that in most cases it is not allowed to use the first person in essays, that is why check everything twice before using “I” in your paper.
Some fact or definition
Such types of hooks for essays serve to surprise your reader. Give the interesting fact about something you are going to describe and discuss in your essay’s body, and you will grab the attention of your audience at once.
“Spain, though hardly a literary juggernaut, translates more books in one year than the entire Arab world has in the past one thousand years.”
“Amiable is the best way to describe Elizabeth’s personality: she was friendly and caring.”
It’s not the worst essay hooks idea as well. By giving some proven facts at the very beginning of you paper, you will interest your readers and make them want to read more details about the fact provided.
“The average iceberg weighs over 100,000 metric tons.”
“70% of all jobs found today were got through different networking strategies”
In thesis statements, you should avoid using
statements like, “This essay will discuss…” or
“I’m going to write about…” Try to write a
thesis statement that captures your reader’s
attention without announcing your main topic
and stating the obvious. Look at the examples
In the next slide.
Key Features
Don’t State the Obvious
Identify the specific topic …
In this essay, I am going to discuss the effects of long-term drug abuse.
Long-term drug use can have disastrous effects on one’s marriage, career, and health.
Write a clear thesis statement
Explain how your paper is organized
The Thesis Statement
A Road Map for Your Essay
Introduction
Thesis Statement
Body Paragraph #1
Body Paragraph #2
Body Paragraph #3
After you have brainstormed and you have some main
ideas of what you would like to write in your essay, you can
begin thinking about writing a thesis statement .
Thesis Statements
What’s a thesis statement ????
A thesis statement is a complete sentence
that contains one main idea. This idea controls
the content of the entire essay. A thesis
statement that contains subpoints also helps a
reader know how the essay will be organized.
Look at the introductory paragraph below. See
if you can identify the thesis statement and
subpoints .
Thesis Statement: The Essay’s main idea
Since the thesis statement is the main idea for the entire essay, it should express a complete thought and be a complete sentence. The thesis statement is asserting an opinion or idea, so it should not be a question. The writer of the essay then uses the body paragraphs to prove his or her opinion . Look at the next examples to see how they can be made into thesis statements.
More about thesis statements…
For most of my life I have lived with bad health, smelly clothes, and a chronic cough. My children and husband begged me to stop the habit that caused these conditions, but I couldn’t. The habit of smoking had wrapped its addicting arms around me and was slowly strangling me until one day I realized I had to stop. This realization came after three terrifying events occurred in my family.
The thesis statement comes at the end of the introductory paragraph. This sentence tells the reader that he/she can expect to read about the events that caused the author to stop smoking in the rest of the essay.
When I was young, I always knew that I wanted to become a teacher someday. When I played, I would often gather my dolls together and pretend to teach them how to do math problems or how to read a book. As I grew older, my desire to become an ESL teacher became clearer as I did some volunteer teaching overseas and in the United States. As I look back on my reasons for becoming a teacher, there are three reasons that stand out. These are: my love for the English language, my innate interest in how people learn, and my desire to help other people .
Thesis Statements and Subpoints (This is a personal essay.)
The thesis statement contains the main idea that controls the content of the essay.
Subpoints in the thesis or nearby help the reader know how the essay will be organized
Psychologists have argued for decades about how a person’s character is formed. Numerous psychologists believe that one’s birth order (i.e. place in the family as the youngest, oldest, or middle child) has the greatest influence. B irth order can have a significant impact in the formation of a child’s character . Birth order can strongly affect one’s relationship with parents, relationships with others, and how one views responsibility as an adult.
Another Example: Written in third person… more formal.
Non-examples and Examples
How to revise weak thesis statements
The sport of cross-country running.
Why do I want to be a teacher?
This is not a complete sentence.
The sport of cross-country running has allowed me
to get in better shape and meet some interesting people.
Being a teacher is a great profession because it allows me to work with students and be creative.
This is a question, not a statement.
I learned to play many musical instruments when I was young.
This would not be considered a good thesis statement because it is only expressing a fact. It doesn’t give the writer’s opinion or attitude on playing musical instruments. This thesis statement doesn’t give the writer very much to explain or prove in his/her essay.
Learning to play many musical instruments when I was young helped me to become a more intelligent and well-rounded person.
This thesis statement is much better because it expresses how the writer feels about the experience of learning to play musical instruments. This thesis statement requires the writer to explain how and why playing a musical instrument made him/her a better person.
How to revise weak thesis statements by adding the opinion element
Thesis Statement Review
You can make your thesis statement more
specific by including subtopics or supporting
ideas. By doing this, you give your reader a
clear idea of what will follow in the body
paragraphs of your essay.
Adding Subtopics to your Thesis
Adding Subtopics
The large influx of people to California has had major effects on the state.
No subtopics are named in this thesis statement.
The large influx of people to California has had major effects on the ability of the state to provide housing, electricity, and jobs for all residents.
This statement names three subtopics. Can you find all of the subtopics?
subtopic #1
subtopic #2
subtopic #3
Key Features of the Thesis
1. states the main idea of the essay in a complete sentence, not in a question.
3. states an opinion or attitude on a topic. ( doesn’t just state the topic, itself)
2. is usually at the end of an introduction.
4. often lists subtopics.
5. does not directly announce your main topic.
Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow , the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.
Q&A for work
Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.
Thesis without a preview of the supporting points of the essay: "With a more international world, every citizen should learn to speak a second language."
Thesis with a preview of the supporting points of the essay: "Everyone should shop at Walmart because they have variety, a large inventory, and cheap prices ."
I would like to know whether a good thesis statement should always include a preview of the supporting points to be discussed in the body of the essay or not.
I was always taught that the second option is what a Thesis statement should look like.
In a Five Paragraph Essay, you have your introduction, three paragraphs and your conclusion.
The introduction paragraph should include your hook (the first sentence), your thesis statement, and a closing sentence to lead into the next paragraph.
Each of the three paragraphs of your essay should have their own subject or point to get across. Make sure you do a good job of rolling into the next paragraph, otherwise it will sound rough/jarring/confusing to the reader.
The conclusion should be just that: a conclusion. Sum up your essay and drive your point across one last time.
Back to your original question, the Thesis statement itself should state your declaration (the point of your essay) and three supporting points or three reasons why to believe you (each reason being elaborated in your body paragraphs). The second example you gave was the perfect example of a good Thesis statement .
In the example, "Everyone should shop at Walmart" is your declaration. It's what your essay is about and what you're trying to convince your readers of (that Walmart is where everyone should be shopping). Then you list your three reasons why they should shop at Walmart: they have variety, a large inventory, and cheap prices. You would then go on to write a paragraph on their variety, a paragraph on their large inventory, and a paragraph regarding Walmart's cheap prices.
A good Thesis statement will have a declaration and three supporting points, however if your essay is formatted differently or doesn't have three reasons, you could get away with just using your declaration as your Thesis. For example, you could say "I believe everybody should shop at Walmart" and use that as your Thesis statement. It's simple and gets your main point across. Obviously the more elaborate Thesis is preferred, but this simple one will do fine if you are struggling coming up with the three points. My English teacher actually gave this as one of the options for a Thesis.
To sum up, the second option is preferred, however a good Thesis does not always have to include a preview of the supporting points to be discussed in the paragraphs. You could get away with a simple, straight-to-the-point Thesis with just your declaration and depending on your essay, it might sound smoother with the rest of your writing and essay style.
Reminder: Answers generated by artificial intelligence tools are not allowed on Writing Stack Exchange. Learn more
Post as a guest.
Required, but never shown
By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy .
As nouns the difference between hook and thesis, as a verb hook, derived terms, related terms, external links.
A lot of emphasis in education is placed on showing what you know. But for at least a decade now, as I’ve thought about the twin challenges of engaging students and defending the place of philosophy in a college education, I’ve stopped emphasizing the mastery of content for its own sake. Instead, I’ve emphasized using content as a starting point for critical thinking. In doing so, I realized that critical thinking is at least as much about asking questions as answering them: questions are part of a critical stance.
I teach at a pair of small, Catholic Benedictine liberal arts colleges—one for men, one for women—that share a single academic program. Most of the students in my classes are there for one general education requirement or another, even in upper-division courses. So I think broadly about what it means to have a liberal arts education and the skills students can take with them beyond college. Among these, one of the most valuable is also one of our departmental learning goals: resisting the urge for quick and easy answers . Asking questions is one way of learning to do this.
So for the past few years, I’ve been trying to teach my students to articulate where questions come from: their context and motivation, the mystery that drives them, and the hook that engages us in inquiry. I have three motivations for this specific approach.
First, and most practically, I want them to write better introductions to papers. A lot of my students know that an introduction needs to contain a thesis, and they know there’s supposed to be some kind of hook to engage their audience. But they frequently need help crafting a narrow and interesting thesis, and they rarely know how to craft a relevant and engaging hook. I realized that we can solve both of these issues if they can articulate a question the thesis is answering. “People have been talking about X since the dawn of time”—maybe—but why? If we know what’s bugging our proverbial/mythical ancestors, then we can see what kind of answer is interesting. And we also have our hook, because questions are engaging. They alert us to something interesting: a gap in knowledge, something unusual that needs explanation, a puzzle, a mystery.
Second, we are told that philosophy begins in wonder. That means (among other things) asking questions. If I want my students to really do philosophy and not just learn about it (and I do), they need questions.
Third, and relatedly, there are lots of kinds of wondering, so wonder alone doesn’t define philosophy. What makes philosophical wondering different from scientific or historical or economic wondering? I find it handy to define the field of philosophy in terms of its questions. But just listing the big philosophical questions, as we often do, is defining by example and doesn’t get to the heart of the issue. It doesn’t really explain what makes philosophy different from, say, science, and how to know a philosophical question when you meet one. It’s a good start to say that philosophical questions are not settled empirically (though facts might be needed to answer them); they’re open-ended and difficult to settle in any definitive way; and they’re about “fundamental” issues like concepts, knowledge, and values (though this is defining by example again). Still, this is pretty vague and high-level for students. I want to see if we can define philosophical questions more accessibly, so that students have a way in.
These three motivations led me to try teaching students to think about where questions come from. We talk about what makes us ask questions. Sometimes we want information or clarification. Sometimes we’re surprised or confused or puzzled or curious. (Sometimes we’re just trying to show off or be a pain in the butt, too, but I’ll assume this isn’t serious questioning and set it aside.) We ask questions when we get stopped, stuck on something that’s in the way of our understanding whatever it is we’re trying to understand—when we’ve run into a mystery. (By this standard, test questions aren’t really questions, they’re instructions: show me what you know about X; demonstrate your Y skills.)
This mystery quality is what the questions in my three motivations have in common. Thus, I started asking students to introduce questions by identifying what stops someone’s understanding of something and articulating the mystery that leads to the question. A well-stated question will provide some background and then end with “So, ?” I provide templates to help them get started.
One template is the “clashing intuitions” approach. A lot of (philosophical) questions arise when we notice that we have two intuitions about something that isn’t compatible, at least on the face of it. The template for this kind of question is: On the one hand, it looks like X. On the other hand, it looks like not-X. So how should we make sense of this?
Free will provides a nice example of this one. On the one hand, it certainly feels like you’re deciding what to eat for lunch, and that nothing is compelling you in any particular direction. On the other hand, any physical event has a physical cause—and your reaching out to grab the sandwich is a physical event. Those two things can’t be true at the same time, because if my reaching for the sandwich is the result of other physical events, my apparent choice had nothing to do with it. Still, the feeling of choice is strong. So do we have free will?
A second template is the “wait, I don’t actually know what that is” approach. In a discussion, it often happens that we’re using some term pretty freely, and at some point, we realize that not everybody understands it the same way, so we need to spend some time defining what we mean. The template I give students for this one is: We all think we understand X; after all, we use the concept in regular life and people seem to (more or less) understand each other. But do we? There are cases (Y, Z) that make us realize that we don’t really understand X. So, what is X?
Just about any big concept provides an example for this one. Take beauty. We can all name some definitely beautiful things, and some definitely not-beautiful things. But when you meet an edge case—say when you disagree with someone and try to argue about whether that person, painting, landscape, building, etc. is beautiful—you realize you only have fuzzy working knowledge of beauty, not well-defined knowledge. So, what is beauty?
A third template is the “What’s the meaning of this?” approach. It’s based on the fact that we sometimes worry about the consequences of different ideas, and that motivates us to wonder why, or what’s at stake. The template goes like this: X is (or might be) the case. But if that’s true, then it has consequences that don’t fit with our usual understanding of things, or that we haven’t thought (enough) about yet, such as Y. So what does X mean for us?
For example: We know that humans are animals. But we have a long history of thinking we’re special or separate or superior to other animals. So what should we make of this—the fact that we’re animals, and/or the fact that we think we’re special? In other words: What does it mean for us that we’re animals?
On a very general level, then, and for pedagogical purposes, a useful formula for getting students to introduce a question usually involves an initial statement, followed by a “but” that introduces some contrast or problem with the statement, and ends with “so,” the question. Obviously, this won’t cover every case, but it gives students a path into territory they’ve never entered before, or have been in but often haphazardly, without orientation.
This formula works well for setting up a thesis as an answer to the question. And it provides grounds for more detailed and richer theses, because the setup already shows where there will be difficulties in taking one side of the issue. This way, they’re more likely to argue for something focused and narrow: “I will argue that A, because B and C outweigh D.” It’s not foolproof, and they still need practice crafting theses, but I find it helps get beyond a simple report about what they’ll argue for.
I start by having students practice introducing questions I’ve given them, and from there we can move to them writing their own questions, noticing where they get stopped when thinking about a topic. Asking students to introduce questions also has the advantage of tending to make paper assignments more authentic because students are investigating questions that they can at least see the logic of, if not actually own for themselves. They especially come to see the value of this in the “ Philosophy in the Wild ” assignment I have them do, in which they go “undercover” and hold a philosophical conversation with someone who doesn’t know they’re doing an assignment. They can’t just spring a question on their partner out of the blue; they need to set it up so that it seems natural.
Practice with introducing questions also helps students get more of a feel for the difference between philosophical questions and other kinds. “Are we alone in the universe?” comes up when I have them read the short story “ They’re Made out of Meat ” by Terry Bisson. The question can be introduced using the “clashing intuitions” template: On the one hand, we don’t have solid evidence that there are aliens; on the other hand, given the vastness of the universe, the probability that life has also evolved elsewhere is pretty good. So, are we alone in the universe? Now we see what arrested our attention. But it’s also clearer that this isn’t a philosophical question, because it’s asking for information. In theory, it could be answered by science.
Maybe we can get from this to a philosophical question, though. In a case like this, the “What’s the meaning of this?” template comes in handy. I ask students to think about the interests that might have motivated us to ask whether there are aliens, because maybe we can find philosophical questions in the neighborhood. It seems to matter to us whether there is life elsewhere. But why? Because that will mean we need to adjust our understanding of our place in the universe. Or because we’ll need to figure out how to treat them. “What will it mean for us if there are aliens?” or “If we ever meet aliens, how should we treat them?”—those are invitations to philosophy.
So I’ve found a lot of pedagogical value in teaching students to think through the motivations for questions. But wait, there’s more! I think it comes in handy not only in motivating students, but also when philosophers are asked to justify our ongoing existence as a department (and, more broadly, a field). When asked by a student, administrator, politician, or average person, Why should we care about this? , it’s hard (though not impossible!) to say things that will convince a skeptic when philosophy is framed as a matter of knowledge. What is the use of knowing Plato’s theory of the Forms?
But when philosophy is framed as a matter of thinking—including asking questions—it’s much easier to make a case. What’s the use of getting surprised or confused or puzzled or curious— wondering about— Plato’s theory of the Forms? A number of answers open up. For one thing, the questions are interesting and important. Plato’s theory arises from, and leads to, important questions about knowledge, reality, and even ethics—questions that still matter today, even if we don’t accept Plato’s view.
Furthermore, I don’t have systematic evidence for this, but I’ll bet that practice with articulating questions’ background makes it more likely that we’ll notice questions in the first place. When we start to frame questions as mysteries, we might start to see more things as surprising, puzzling, confusing, or curious. Or, at least, we might realize that more things are mysterious than we would otherwise notice. This is itself an important critical thinking skill: the readiness to suspend belief in the status quo.
But also, the ability to articulate where questions come from is part of the very valuable skill of getting to the heart of an issue. When we understand the motivations for our questions, we’re better able to understand what will count as answers and why those answers matter. (Once or twice a year, a major publication comes out with an article that tells us that employers really want this skill, and like philosophy/humanities/liberal arts majors because they have it.)
In short: questioning is thinking, and to the extent that we want to teach thinking, we should be teaching students to frame questions as well as answer them.
The Question-Focused Pedagogy series of the APA Blog is focused on how we can, ought to, fail to, and might teach question-skills and pass on the values and importance of questions and questioning to students. If you would like to publish in the Question-Focused Pedagogy series, please reach out to its editor, Stephen Bloch-Schulman at sschulman@elon.edu.
Erica Lucast Stonestreet is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy department at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University in central Minnesota. She is most interested in the ethical dimensions of love and caring, and the relationships, projects and things that make us who we are. She is currently working on a popular-audience book tentatively called Who We Are and How to Live, which aims to show how conceptions of human nature influence theories of ethics, and argue for a more relational conception of human beings. She is the 2023 recipient of her institutions’ Sister Mary Grell / Robert Spaeth Teacher of Distinction award.
The godfather’s mafia meeting scene: a fictional narrative of hobbesian contractarianism, philosophy of language, helen l. daly, on student-faculty relationships, existentialism, joshua m. hall, responses to liberalism, alexis dianda, teaching moral reasoning with terminator and jesus, leave a reply cancel reply.
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
Notify me of follow-up comments by email.
Notify me of new posts by email.
WordPress Anti-Spam by WP-SpamShield
Currently you have JavaScript disabled. In order to post comments, please make sure JavaScript and Cookies are enabled, and reload the page. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser.
Advanced search
What is patriotism, philosophy and bitcoin, editorial: ‘fear me, if you dare’ inviting reflections on the riddle..., ozempic, “food noise,” and the pathologization of hunger, introducing the question-focused pedagogy (qfp) series.
English-speaking teens are spreading their problems abroad.
Listen to this article
Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.
T he argument that smartphones and social media are contributing to the rise in teen mental distress is strong. A number of observational and experimental studies show that teen anxiety started rising just as smartphones, social media, and front-facing cameras contributed to a wave of negative emotionality that seems to be sweeping the world.
But I have one small reason to question the strongest version of the smartphone thesis. You can find a summary of it on page 5 of this year’s World Happiness Report , a survey of thousands of people across more than 140 countries. “Between 2006 and 2023, happiness among Americans under 30 in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand declined significantly [and] also declined in Western Europe,” the report says. But here’s the catch: In the rest of the world, under-30 happiness mostly increased in this period. “Happiness at every age has risen sharply in Central and Eastern Europe,” the report says. “In the former Soviet Union and East Asia too there have been large increases in happiness at every age.”
This is pretty weird. Smartphones are a global phenomenon. But apparently the rise in youth anxiety is not. In some of the largest and most trusted surveys, it appears to be largely occurring in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “If you’re looking for something that’s special about the countries where youth unhappiness is rising, they’re mostly Western developed countries,” says John Helliwell, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the World Happiness Report. “And for the most part, they are countries that speak English.”
The story is even more striking when you look at the most objective measures of teen distress: suicide and self-harm. Suicides have clearly increased in the U.S. and the U.K. Emergency-room visits for suicide attempts and self-harm have been skyrocketing for Gen Z girls across the Anglosphere in the past decade, including in Australia and New Zealand. But there is no rise in suicide or self-harm attempts in similar high-income countries with other national languages, such as France, Germany, and Italy. As Vox ’s Eric Levitz wrote , the suicide rate among people ages 15 to 19 actually fell significantly across continental Europe from 2012 to 2019.
Happiness is a notoriously difficult thing to measure. So I asked Helliwell for more data. He suggested we look more closely at his home country of Canada, which has two official languages—French and English. In Quebec, more than 80 percent of the population speaks French; in neighboring Ontario, less than 4 percent of the population speaks French. Quebec seems like a perfect place to test the question “Is mental health declining less among young non-English speakers?”
The answer seems to be yes. In Gallup data used for the World Happiness Report, life satisfaction for people under 30 in Quebec fell half as much as it did for people in the rest of Canada, Helliwell told me. In a separate analysis of Canada’s General Social Survey, which asks respondents about their preferred language, researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta found that young people who speak French at home saw a smaller decline in happiness than those who speak English at home.
Jonathan Haidt: The dangerous experiment on teen girls
So youth in English-speaking Canada are becoming sadder faster than those in French-speaking Canada, and measures of teen suicidality are rising in the Anglosphere but less so in similar less-English-speaking countries.
What’s the deal with Anglosphere despair? Maybe this is a statistical illusion that will evaporate with more research. Maybe speaking English is a rough proxy for economic development, and this is mostly about affluent countries with lots of teen smartphone use. I couldn’t find any papers on the subject of why language would correlate with mental health for teenagers. Helliwell, a renowned expert of international happiness research, didn’t know of any comprehensive analysis on the subject either.
But after several conversations with happiness experts and psychologists, I’ve cobbled together a tentative theory. We’re seeing the international transmission of a novel Western theory of mental health. It’s the globalization of Western—and, just maybe, American —despair.
I n the past few years , at least three distinct phenomena have potentially contributed to the gloom of the Anglosphere. Let’s think of them as diagnostic inflation, prevalence inflation, and negativity inflation.
First, the diagnostics. In 2013, the psychiatrist Allen Frances offered a warning to his field. Frances had chaired the American Psychiatric Association during revisions of the fourth edition of psychiatry’s “bible,” the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , commonly known as DSM-IV . The first edition of the DSM — published in 1952 in response to the needs of military personnel returning from World War II—listed about 100 mental disorders. By 2013, the number of disorders listed in the DSM had swelled to nearly 300. In his 2013 book, Saving Normal , Frances warned that “a looser definition of sickness” could make people worse off. “DSM-V opens up the possibility that millions and millions of people currently considered normal will be diagnosed as having a mental disorder,” he told the Canadian Medical Association Journal that year. The expansion of clinical vocabulary risked creating a new set of patients he called the “worried well”—people with normal human experiences who spent a lot of time worrying that they have a disorder. He and others called this phenomenon “diagnostic inflation”—the slapping-on of more (and more, and more) clinical labels to pathologize everyday sadness and stress.
Frances was mostly concerned that diagnostic inflation would lead to over-medicalization. He might have been right. By 2016, the share of people in the U.S. using antidepressants was more than twice as high as in Spain, France, or Germany, and nine times higher than in South Korea.
As our mental-health lexicon has expanded, U.S. content creators have recognized that anxiety is a hugely popular—or, at least, hugely attention-grabbing—topic for young people scrolling on their phones. As I reported in December, the TikTok hashtag #Trauma has more than 6 billion views. According to the podcast search engine Listen Notes, more than 5,500 podcasts have the word trauma in their title. In celebrity media, mental-health testimonials are so common that they’ve spawned a subgenre of summaries of celebrity mental-health testimonials, including “39 Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Mental Health,” “What 22 Celebrities Have Said About Having Depression,” and “12 Times Famous Men Got Real About Mental Health.”
This takes us from diagnostic inflation to “prevalence inflation,” the term psychologists Lucy Foulkes and Jack L. Andrews use to describe the phenomenon of people developing apparent anxiety disorders from the sheer ubiquity of concern about anxiety disorders that swirl all around them. It might work something like this: People who keep hearing about new mental-health terminology—from their friends, from their family, from social-media influencers—start processing normal levels of anxiety as perilous signs of their own pathology. “If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them … they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens,” Foulkes and Andrews wrote . This can create a self-fulfilling spiral: More anxiety diagnoses lead to more hypervigilance among young people about their anxiety, which leads to more withdrawal from everyday activities, which creates actual anxiety and depression, which leads to more diagnoses, and so on.
To be clear, bringing anxiety and depression out of the shadows has been a societal mitzvah for many. Twentieth-century cultural touchstones such as The Deer Hunter and Revolutionary Road remind us that adults have long suffered from PTSD and depression in shame and silence. Nobody should want to bring back these postwar mental-health norms. But there is a difference between destigmatizing mental-health problems and popularizing them to the point that millions of young people are searching their normal feelings for signs of disorders.
Finally, as diagnostic inflation and prevalence inflation combined to raise the salience of our neuroses, something else was happening behind the scenes. The general tenor of America’s political and economic news discourse got much more negative in a very short period of time. To match diagnostic and prevalence inflation, let’s call this negativity inflation.
Last year, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana University, and London Business School used machine learning to scan text from hundreds of millions of pages, from thousands of American newspapers in all 50 states, from the 1850s to the 2020s. They tracked the frequency of positive words ( success , optimistic , upbeat ) and negative words ( failure , insolvent , loss ) through dozens of recessions, several panics, and a few major wars. “For a very long period of time, our index of negativity in American news articles fluctuated around a stable average,” the UPenn economist J. H. van Binsbergen, a co-author on the paper, told me. But since the 1970s, negativity has gone haywire. “News coverage has just gotten more and more negative every decade in the last 50 years, especially when you adjust for economic recessions,” he said. Around 2015, the frequency of negative news coverage accelerated. By 2019 and 2020, the average sentiment of American news was more negative than ever.
How did the news get so glum? One possibility is that the media industry has become more competitive in the past few decades, as newspapers struggled to compete with cable news for viewership—and then with websites and digital platforms for advertising. As publishers became desperate to capture distracted audiences, more of them doubled down on that ancient truism: Bad news sells. In the 2001 paper “ Bad Is Stronger Than Good ,” psychologists from Case Western Reserve University and Free University of Amsterdam wrote that bad emotions might naturally grab our attention and persist in our memory, because it is “evolutionarily adaptive” for intelligent animals to focus more on stimuli that threaten their safety. The internet has supercharged this hominid instinct, the NYU psychologist Jay Van Bavel told me in an interview on my podcast, Plain English . The title of a 2023 paper that he co-authored says it all: “ Negativity Drives Online News Consumption .”
Put it all together—diagnostic inflation in medicine; prevalence inflation in media; negativity inflation in news—and one gets the distinct sense that Americans might be making themselves sick with pessimism, anxiety, and gloom. But that’s not all. Just as the U.S. has long been the global economy’s chief cultural exporter—from Coca-Cola to Mickey Mouse—it’s conceivable that we are disseminating throughout the English-speaking world a highly neurotic and individualistic approach to mental health, which is raising the salience of anxiety and depression for young people spending hours every day marinating in English-speaking media.
I n his book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche , Ethan Watters offers a fascinating provocation: As Americans export their culture around the world, are we also exporting our ideas about mental illness, anxiety, and depression?
Watters begins by reminding us that mental illness has historically been localized and diverse. For centuries in Malaysia and Indonesia, men were said to experience amok if, after periods of brooding following an insult, they launched into a murderous rage. In parts of Asia and Africa, koro anxiety referred to the debilitating worry that one’s genitals were shrinking or retracting into one’s body. In Victorian Europe, thousands of affluent women in the era claimed they couldn’t get out of bed, because of the onset of “hysterical leg paralysis,” while many young men suffered from “hysterical fugue”—a trance in which they would walk for hundreds of miles for no particular reason.
But globalization and the internet may be flattening the world’s once spiky terrain of mental disorders, Watters claims. His most striking example comes from Hong Kong, where psychiatrists tell him that, for centuries, there was practically no record of anybody suffering from anorexia in the city-state. That changed in 1994, when a young girl died of apparent starvation in the middle of a busy street in front of news cameras, causing a national panic. Mental-health experts from the West arrived to offer an explanation: This was anorexia nervosa—self-starvation. On TV and in schools, these experts explained how young girls with extreme stress or depression might be susceptible to this new disease. Within a decade, anorexia rates in Hong Kong skyrocketed by orders of magnitude.
A simplistic explanation of Hong Kong’s anorexia surge—along with koro and hysterical fugue—would be that mental illness is always and everywhere a case of social contagion. That’s wrong. What we call worry and sadness are universal human traits, and many psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, show up around the world. Watters’s most interesting idea is more subtle: Negative thoughts and feelings whisper to us from the subconscious. To make sense of our darkest thoughts, we may pull concepts off the shelf—grabbing whatever’s circulating in our local culture at that time—to articulate and act out our bad feelings.
Meghan O’Rourke: Hypochondria never dies
“Patients unconsciously endeavor to produce symptoms that will correspond to the medical diagnostics of the time,” one mental-health expert tells Watters. So if you grow up in a 19th-century environment where you are told that stressed people don’t get out of bed, you might not get out of bed , and your doctors might diagnose you with hysterical leg paralysis . And if you grow up in a 21st-century culture in which your phone keeps lighting up with high-arousal negativity, you might explain the inchoate worried gloom you experience on the internet in the patois of the times: I’m sick; I have trauma; this is my disorder. If Watters is right, it’s not outlandish to think that an individualistic, made-in-America approach to mental health—which promotes a kind of obsessive fixation on our traumas and anxieties—might be spreading throughout the English-speaking world, like any bit of culture.
T his is a novel hypothesis —which, almost by definition, doesn’t have nearly enough data behind it to count as an empirical theory. To reiterate, the “anxiety inflation” hypothesis has four parts.
I don’t want to let smartphones and social media off the hook here, nor do I think that my anxiety-inflation theory is a strong objection to Jonathan Haidt’s thesis in The Anxious Generation . Haidt himself has written about the content young people consume on social media, including the rise of a “reverse-CBT” ideology, which encourages catastrophic interpretations of normal thoughts and feelings. But I think we need to deal head-on with a real empirical mystery here: If smartphone use is global, why is the strongest evidence of surging teen anxiety mostly in English-speaking countries and not in their less-English-speaking neighbors?
My answer is that although mental illness is global, the experience of mental illness cannot be separated from culture. If there is a surge of Anglospheric gloom among teenagers, we have to study the culture that young people are consuming with their technology. In the past generation, the English-speaking world, led by the U.S., has experimented with a novel approach to mental health that has expanded the ranks of the “worried well,” while social media has surrounded young people with reminders to obsess over their anxieties and traumas, just as U.S. news media have inundated audiences with negativity to capture their fleeting attention.
IMAGES
VIDEO
COMMENTS
A hook is the first sentence or two of your essay that grabs your reader's interest and curiosity. It can be a question, a quote, a statistic, a story, or anything else that relates to your topic ...
1) Hook: Description, illustration, narration or dialogue that pulls the reader into your paper topic. This should be interesting and specific. 2) Transition: Sentence that connects the hook with the thesis. 3) Thesis: Sentence (or two) that summarizes the overall main point of the paper.
The "hook" is the first sentence of your essay introduction. It should lead the reader into your essay, giving a sense of why it's interesting. To write a good hook, avoid overly broad statements or long, dense sentences. Try to start with something clear, concise and catchy that will spark your reader's curiosity.
Introductions, Thesis Statements, and Roadmaps. The first paragraph or two of any paper should be constructed with care, creating a path for both the writer and reader to follow. However, it is very common to adjust the introduction more than once over the course of drafting and revising your document. In fact, it is normal (and often very ...
A thesis statement: tells the reader how you will interpret the significance of the subject matter under discussion. is a road map for the paper; in other words, it tells the reader what to expect from the rest of the paper. directly answers the question asked of you. A thesis is an interpretation of a question or subject, not the subject itself.
Cite a dramatic fact or statistic. Your introduction also needs to adequately explain the topic and organization of your paper. Your thesis statement identifies the purpose of your paper. It also helps focus the reader on your central point. An effective thesis establishes a tone and a point of view for a given purpose and audience.
Create an outline of your essay to make sure everything flows. Think about stories that draw your attention and how the writer is able to do it. Set the scene for your essay. Set the tone of your essay. Determine what structure you want to establish. Check your facts, statistics, and quotes for accuracy.
Step 2: Write your initial answer. After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process. The internet has had more of a positive than a negative effect on education.
Here are seven ideas to choose from: 1. Story. Everyone likes a good story. If an interesting story or anecdote relates to your essay topic, the hook is a great place to include it. For example: In January 2023, two children were playing outside in a Los Angeles neighborhood.
Today, you will be crafting the rest of your writing so I want us to identify the difference between a hook and a thesis in Pérez's work: The hook is always the part that grabs our attention. It's at the very beginning of the piece and tells a story that gets us thinking, "Hmm, tell me more." A thesis is the part that says, "Here is exactly ...
The bridge is the transition between the hook and the thesis statement. It can be written in different ways depending on what type of essay is being created. The bridge generally comes in two ...
A thesis driven essay is comprised of an initial thesis statement that establishes a claim or argument, and ensuing topic sentences that support and develop that claim. Ideally, a reader would be able to read only the thesis statement and topic sentences of your text, and still be able to understand the main ideas and
A hook should also be clearly distinguishable from your thesis: a hook broadly introduces the topic of your essay; a thesis specifically defines the argument of your essay, ... The only glaring difference between making small talk and writing an essay hook is that you have to stay on topic, avoiding the inclusion of any unsolicited, unnecessary ...
The main idea, thesis statement, and topic sentences all provide structure to an essay. It is important for both readers and writers to understand the roles of each of these in order to maintain ...
The hook is where the reader begins reading an essay. But it is not where the writer begins writing an essay. A good essay is thought though and written out of order. The proper sequence in which to write an essay (after you have organized it) is. Thesis, first; body paragraph topic sentences, second;
Thesis Statements, Claims, and Evidence Introduction. The three important parts of an argumentative essay are: A thesis statement is a sentence, usually in the first paragraph of an article, that expresses the article's main point. It is not a fact; it's a statement that you could disagree with.
A thesis statement is a concise (brief, not wordy) sentence or two that states what the essay is about. gives direction to the essay. usually placed at the end of the introductory paragraph. Explain how your paper is organized. This sentence may be part of the thesis or a separate sentence after the thesis.
I was always taught that the second option is what a Thesis statement should look like. In a Five Paragraph Essay, you have your introduction, three paragraphs and your conclusion. The introduction paragraph should include your hook (the first sentence), your thesis statement, and a closing sentence to lead into the next paragraph.
Grammar and writing lesson for "Selecting a Strong Hook 2: Disagreeing" and "Selecting a Strong Hook"
As nouns the difference between hook and thesis. is that hook is a rod bent into a curved shape, typically with one end free and the other end secured to a rope or other attachment while thesis is a statement supported by arguments.
A lot of my students know that an introduction needs to contain a thesis, and they know there's supposed to be some kind of hook to engage their audience. But they frequently need help crafting a narrow and interesting thesis, and they rarely know how to craft a relevant and engaging hook.
Strong Bridge: Connects Hook to Thesis. According to the Dalai Lama, "Our prime purpose in this life is to help others.". Yet in Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Greg believes that his prime purpose is to take care of himself. Though he is occasionally friendly to his classmates, Greg only helps others when it benefits him. By ...
I don't want to let smartphones and social media off the hook here, nor do I think that my anxiety-inflation theory is a strong objection to Jonathan Haidt's thesis in The Anxious Generation ...