Some of your students will figure out how to write an introduction
without any help from you. Most students, however, need help seeing
the basic pattern before they can follow it.
Fortunately, you can help them as part of your literacy
coaching effort rather than taking time from teaching writing
to help students analyze the construction of an introductory paragraph.
As Bloom's venerable taxonomy
of educational objectives points out, there is a vast difference
between:
Before you dig into this
material on teaching students how to write an introduction, you
may want to refresh your knowledge of introduction characteristics.
Ideas are arranged funnel-fashion
The introduction is often represented visually as an equilateral
triangle balanced on one point, or as a funnel. The implication
is that the ideas within an introduction are arranged from
broad to narrow. The narrowest idea is the thesis
statement at the end of the introductory paragraph.
That visual representation is a generalization. Before students
understand it well enough to use it in their own work, they need
practice reading and dissecting introductions.
Below is a an introductory paragraph for a short (500-word
essay).
Businesses today try to attract lifelong customers. Drug companies
are no exception. Recently they began advertising directly to
end-users, trying to get patients to ask their doctors for specific
prescription drugs. Although the practice began with ads aimed
at adults, television ads for drugs now target children. Such
ads should be prohibited.
To examine the introduction, you have to find the nouns and verbs
that are keywords in each sentence. When you do that grammatical
analysis, you find that the writer uses hypernyms and
hyponyms to narrow to the thesis.
(Hypernym and hyponym are scary-sounding terms,
but your scientifically-minded kids will readily grasp the idea
of classifying ideas the way scientists classify rocks
or bugs when you point it out to them.)
-
The broad term businesses narrows to one type
of business, drug companies.
-
The idea of attracting customers narrows to
advertising to customers.
The idea of customers narrows to patients.
Patients further narrow to adults and children.
Will most students be able to write an introduction after dissecting
a paragraph? No. Most will have to do this repeatedly as part
of your instruction in reading
comprehension.
Easily overlooked introduction facts
If you were to discuss the sample paragraph with your students,
you should draw attention to several facts they might miss, namely
. . .
-
The introduction is short: five sentences totaling
52 words.
-
The introduction contains no evidence for the thesis.
-
The thesis sentence is stated more subtly than
a working thesis would be.
As an informal writing activity, have students write out what
they think the working thesis for this paper looked like.
It was probably something like this:
Televised prescription drug ads aimed at children should be
prohibited.
A big part of teaching students how to write an introduction
is getting them to see that the working thesis is part
of the underlying structure of the finished essay even
though that finished essay has a lot more polish and pizzazz.
