How to Write A+ Introductions in English Essays

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Hi, my name is John and today I will be going through how you can write really good introductions in English essays especially here in Australian high schools.

Introductions are strange beasts and can be very tricky if you are not taught how to properly write one. Many teachers claim they mean little to nothing, as long as your body paragraphs are good. Others claim that they set expectations which they mark for the rest of the essay. Most markers fall somewhere in between. Intros do three things:


- Set the points of what you will explore
- Show how many holes/weaknesses you’ve left in your preparation
- Give an impression of your writing style


Intros, honestly, should mean very little. But they give away too much about what kind of writer, study and know if you can structure your paragraphs appropriately. The marker can’t help but notice after they’ve marked hundreds if not thousands of essays all year. They instinctively know which essays are going to be good and what isn’t as soon as they’ve finished reading an intro. It doesn’t take a lot of deduction to say that they usually mark whatever they are treated to in your intro – consciously or unconsciously.

It is crucial, then, that you leave no holes unplugged in your intro. Intros are where you get to throw around all the analytical keywords that you get taught at the start of senior high school:

- Purpose of writing
- Text type
- Target audience
- Text’s historical context
- Greater statement on society

This is the one place where you are granted full permission to make sweeping statements on the text itself without being immediately expected to back it up. This is because you back it up in the body paragraphs. Make sure, however, that these analytical terms are all incorporated in some way. A good intro usually takes about half an essay booklet page but it does depend on how big your writing is. Bad ones go for a quarter of a page, and terrible ones go for over a page because the marker knows you’re bluffing and haven’t studied.

I will include a sample intro paragraph on-screen & break this down as well:

Question – Individuals need to communicate with each other otherwise they will be lost. Explore this question.

The concept of personal interaction is that (leads into your thesis) it cannot be determined in a single, simple dialogue between people – they are only indications that display where their relationship is going or from where it has arrived from (thesis). Personal interaction goes beyond dialogue between individuals as it is only the reflection of relationships that in turn grow and change over time. This idea of relationships that are always changing is shown in both Pendleton Ward’s 2010 animation Adventure Time and J.K. Rowling’s 2000 fantasy novel, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (introducing texts). Through this, it is evident that animation (text type and first text) gives the producer a degree of freedom in which Finn And Jake’s intricate relationship to the audience is conveyed by their actions and adventures (technique). It is especially evident to the inconsistency of relationships when such a message is as equally relevant to another non-fiction story about a wizard and his best friends in a magical school (second text) who has to find a way to survive different tribulations (context).

 
As you can see, it clearly shows the sequential nature of how to structure a strong introduction.

Necessary points in an introduction as seen above:

- General comment on the nature of the question
- Introduce your thesis (could be a reading or just a theme you come back to) and how they intersect with the question (in other words, your thesis is your position on the question)
- Introduce text/s, including the author/composer and the date it was created in and text type and Mention how the text type/s is particularly special in helping your thesis resonate with the target audience.
- How this theme remains relevant despite the author’s context fading into history (only if the author is dead)
- How this theme is a relevant reflection of contemporary society (only if the author is alive)
- Brief reference to narratives of texts

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