How to Start an Essay to Hook Your Readers

Starting your essay with an attention-grabbing statement or phrase is a great way to secure your reader’s interest. You can create a hook for an essay using quotation, a surprise, or a question to make the reader desire to continue reading to see what happens next. Even if you solid content in the body of the essay, it is crucial to get your reader to that point with a great attention grabber. This will ensure that your audience will keep on reading your paper.

What Is A Hook Sentence?

A hook is a sentence or several sentences serving as an introduction to an essay. The purpose of a hook sentence is to grab the reader’s attention and create a particular writing tone. It is essential to start your academic papers with authoritative opening paragraphs containing hooking phrases and words. Although it may seem complicated to find perfect persuasive strategies, there are different types of hooking sentences that you can use as excellent, engaging starters.

How to Choose Good Hooks for Essays

Once in a while, you will be required to choose an essay topic without the help of your professor. The best way to do this is to look for recently published articles and identify a good subject. Social and television networks are other platforms full of ideas.

The opening sentence of your essay should complement the whole text instead of having its own life. To make your essay informative and interesting, here are some general tips you can use for your essay.

• Choose a hook that reflects your topic. Using an anecdote or a joke will not work if you are writing a paper on healthcare issues, such as cancer or disability. But, you can use this type of hook to start an essay on TV shows. Other excellent ways to capture your reader’s attention are statistics, interesting facts, and quotes. You are spoilt for choice, if you have an idea for a great essay start, do not hesitate to use it.
• Ask a question to implore your reader want to know the answer from the essay. This is one of the most efficient methods for attention-grabbing: it makes the audience curious. Curiosity will make people read the entire paper trying to know the answer to the question posed at the start of the essay. Still, it is important to answer this question at the end of the paper. Never leave a question unanswered unless it was a rhetorical question.
• Use transition phrases or words to connect entire sentences and ideas. Examples of transition words and phrases include, in contrast, at the same time, on the contrary, moreover, furthermore, among many others. Transitions help in building a bridge between a hook sentence and the other paragraphs in the paper. Linking words will help the writer make a smooth transition between the hook sentence and paragraphs.
• Use formal language to write the essay. Do not use jargon or slang in professional academic writing. In some instances, you can use jargon or slang in your essay but add several good hooks. However, it is advisable to avoid jargon in academic writing. Look at examples of essays with great hooks. Some professional academic websites provide free sample papers that can help you choose a hook sentence. Such samples typically have excellent ideas for your hook. You can also use academic databases to identify samples of good quality hooks to improve your essay.
• Make it short. The shorter the hook sentence, the better – this is a principle that also works for essay hooks. Keep your hook to a minimum size to ensure that readers read it the moment they start to look at your essay. Even before a reader thinks if they want to read the essay or not, you will manage to capture their curiosity and get the best of them. Therefore, they will read the entire text in a bid to find out as much as possible.

Now that you are aware of the principles of using a hook, you can now learn how to create a great hook for an essay.

How to Write a Hooking Statement

It is important to understand that hooking your readers is different and does not always work will all essays. Is your paper formal or creative? Is it an analytical, narrative, definition, or argumentative essay? The best thing is to follow these steps before you start work on your introductory paragraph.

• Decide the type of essay you are writing. The student, being the writer, should know the content of their paper and its purpose. There are many essay types, therefore, know about each type and decide the best one to use.
• Choose the essay type and stick to it. Variations will make you look unprofessional. Most people associate professionalism with the stability of the human mind.
• Consider your target audience. If you read several literary works on the same topic with the target audience being engineers and doctors, you will notice that the language in the books changes in a certain way. So, you should carefully define your audience. Being aware of your potential readers will help in choosing the vocabulary for better.
• Create an essay outline. This will help in structuring your writing and identifying the parts that need more emphasis. The outline is similar to developing a plan for the essay. If you have no idea how to create an outline, research a little bit and read more materials on how to create one. Bear in mind that there are professional writers online, such as Buy-Essay.com who specialize in custom essay writing services. Do not sit there feeling depressed and stressed, contact us for original and unique essay papers.

Examples of Hooking Statements

• Literary Quotes

Understandably, a book review is the ideal occasion to use a literary quote as a hook. Although its application is not limited to book reviews, it also mostly depends on the style and meaning of the quotes. Despite this, it can be the easiest type to locate and use. We recommend being really cautious with literary quotes. However, the use of literary quotes is not appropriate for persuasive and expository essays.

• Famous People Quotes

This is another common type of hook, which is sometimes overused. If you use a quote from a famous person, pick a modern person with great achievements. This will make your readers motivated and interested to continue reading. For example, quotes by Elon Musk are excellent hook ideas when writing a persuasive essay on how to succeed in business and have an impact on the world.

• Public Misconceptions

Show your readers that a misconception they believe to be true is not. Then connect this with your thesis statement. The idea behind this method is to deepen disagreement within the topic, and even generate a disturbance that will make the readers continue reading. You can start with these phrases to show how things are different from the way we see them. This writing approach is suitable for a reflection or explanation essay.

• Jokes and Anecdotes

This is a good option if you are not writing on a serious topic. But, using a joke when starting your paper does not mean that the essay should be humorous. Furthermore, do not forget to be brief. Make the joke brief and aimed at achieving the best results. This is a good way to start an explanatory essay on the role of bad life habits and how to understand of them without fighting them.

• Personal Stories

A personal story is only effective if your story is presented in 2-3 sentences. If this is not possible, look for another hook. Furthermore, do not tell much of your personal story and evaluate if the hook will be suitable for the essay. Narrative stories are an excellent way to present an interesting story to the reader.

• Statistics

This hook type is very effective and can be applied when other types of hooks are not suitable. You can use statistics for persuasive essays and serious topics. Providing figures is as effective as witnessing something through your own eyes. When you show the exact figure, rather than use words “a lot” or “many”, usually impresses people.

• Questions

The trick to using questions as hooks relates to the principle of the functionality of the human brain. Your brain begins to starts to process the question when you hear it, even if you are not required to answer the question or if the question is rhetorical. The reader will start thinking about the question, despite having their own answers, they will get curious about your viewpoint. Another important thing to note is that questions used as hooks should be unusual or even unexpected. The writer can also ask something obvious from a different viewpoint. Do not ask dull or ordinary questions. The hook question will probably interest your readers, make them stop reading, and begin to think about it. Use this type of hook for a cause-and-effect or an argumentative essay.

• Definition or Fact

You can start your essay with an exciting fact or provide a definition to a term related to your topic. The definition or startling fact should be shocking, unexpected, and/or interesting.