20, maybe 30 words. That’s all you get. That is your opportunity to grab someone’s attention before they close your tab or click the next link. The first sentence, and before that your title, present a limited opportunity to capture an audience before they move on.
I want to focus attention on an essay’s first sentence. First, I’ve collected some resources designed for fiction writers. While this might not be a creative writing class, I believe we can benefit from thinking about how their craft can relate to constructing enticing non-fiction prose.
First, from an article over at A Tate Publishing Blog, I pulled three criteria:
- excite a reader’s curiosity, particularly about a character or relationship
- introduce a setting
- lend resonance to a story
These criteria are the goals for an effective first paragraph, but I think any of them additionally apply to a first sentence. I want to break the idea of setting down into three more distinct notions: time, place, and mood. Time and place are fairly straight-forward when it comes to fiction, but mood is more complicated. I want to think move in relation to Heidegger’s sense of our “being-in-the-world“]. The post then gives two questions to ask of a first sentence:
- Does it convey an interesting personality or an action that we want to know more about?
- Can you make it more intriguing by introducing something unusual, something shocking perhaps, something will surprise the reader?
Given my favorable disposition to Peter Brooks’ psychoanalytic treatment of hermeneutics, I boil that second question down to “suspense”: does the first sentence pose a question we want answered?
From a creative writing handbook, I pulled two more criteria for evaluating good sentences:
- Flashes a picture in your mind, using concrete details
- Puts you right in the middle of something happening
Not every first sentence has to be shocking. But it does have to at least have a kind of gravity, something that pulls a reader in, something that makes them want to read more.
Next, let’s read the short article Killing the Babies and Captivating First Sentences” over at footnoteMaven. I like this article not only for its title, but also for its pragmatic advice. When revising, fM focuses on identifying the most compelling sentence in a piece, and then finds a way to “rock” that piece up to the very beginning of a document.
For non-academic writing instructors out there, this makes for an excellent exercise. Come to class with a document that contains every first sentence your students have written for a particular project. Have the students select their three favorites from the list; additionally, have them mark off the three sentences that need the most work. After tallying results, have students apply fM’s theory to whichever piece of writing received the most critical votes–can they, looking through the entire paper, find a compelling sentence that could be crafted into a more engaging opening? And, then, can they use this principle on their own writing?
And, of course, I hope the critical attention such an activity fosters is applied to every sentence they write.
But I don’t want our attention to end with the first sentences–I also want to stress the importance of writing relevant, informative, and intriguing titles. In academia, titles come in two general flavors, MLA (humanities) and APA (science). MLA titles tend to have two parts, the gag line followed by a colon and description of the project. APA titles, on the other hand, tend to be a bit more conservative and usually forgo the gag line. For instance, here’s a journal in Rhetoric and Composition that uses MLA format, CCC. And here’s a list of the top downloaded articles at a journal that uses APA format, TCQ. The point here: put more time into thinking about the title of an essay.
Here’s a collection of the first sentences from the first round of medium.com essays:
I’ve recently become much more interested in the notion of independence days.
The war on terror is widely known among the American people in a very broad/ unclear sense.
Depending on the model used when developing a game, in-app purchasing options can make or break a company and a person’s patience.
Since the beginning of time, people, by nature, have been trying to gain advantages over one another.
How long has it been, really?
Diabetes hasn’t been around as long as many other diseases but it has become a very popular one in today’s time.
Why did you decided to come to college?
Since the rise of the Capitalist economic model beginning in the 1600s, the quality a states’ economy has been dictated by the ability of people to accurately balance the worth of goods against the price being paid for them.
