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Persuasive Writing. Introductions. Writing a good introduction. As a general principal, a good introduction should always : Give the reader a clear indication of the subject matter of your piece. Set the tone of the article and your ‘voice’.
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Persuasive Writing Introductions
Writing a good introduction As a general principal, a good introduction should always: • Give the reader a clear indication of the subject matter of your piece. • Set the tone of the article and your ‘voice’. • Make the reader feel compelled to read the rest of the piece.
What makes a good introduction? In essence, a good introduction will be: • Snappy • Memorable • Succinct • Powerful • Informative • Clearly understood • Capable of establishing tone
…So what makes a bad intro? This one’s easy. Bad introductions will: • Fail to introduce the subject of the piece. • Be very mundane…’The subject I am going to write about is…abortion/capital punishment.’ • Fail to establish a clear tone or line of argument. • Lack style, effective word choice, sentence structure or any other common persuasive writing techniques.
Standing out from the crowd • Making your introduction original and snappy is essential if you are to encourage the reader to continue reading. Here are a few ways to do it. • Hyperbole and tone • Striking statistics • Quoting established experts • Effective word choice and rhetoric • Rhetorical questions • Anecdotes • Lists • Climax and anti-climax • Get to the point…don’t waffle.
Spot the difference • On the next two slides, you will see two introductions which deal with the same subject. • Look, in particular, at how the second version establishes a clear tone of irony and mocking humour through the use of informal word choice and figurative language (metaphor) • The first version is very much what markers will be used to seeing from Higher candidates. You should be able to see clearly why I am urging you to be more stylish than this.
Bad Introduction (example) At the moment, a lot of people are angry in America because people are planning to build a mosque in New York where the September 11th attack happened. In this essay, I am going to tell you why the people getting angry are being misled by the media and why their anger doesn’t make sense.
Good Introduction Things seem awfully heated in America right now; so heated you could probably toast a marshmallow by jabbing it on a stick and holding it toward the Atlantic. Millions are hopping mad over the news that a bunch of triumphalist Muslim extremists are about to build a "victory mosque" slap bang in the middle of Ground Zero. (Charlie Brooker, The Guardian)