Essentials for teaching students
How to write an introduction

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

• Knowing about an introduction, and

• Demonstrating knowledge of how to write an introduction.

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.