Teaching Introductions: The Inverted Pyramid

As I've been reading over the first major writing assignment, I'm realizing something. Well, after I wrote that sentence, two things.

A. People often write their most horrible sentences because they think it fits a proper form.
B. People have trouble with choosing an appropriate scale of generality/specificity in the introduction.

The two are related. In many high schools, students learn how to write an introduction by using an inverted pyramid: they progress from an observation of general interest towards a particular point, the thesis statement. It is rigid, and only sometimes works outside of the expository essay genre. But it can be used well, if the initial appeal and the progression are both appropriate fits for the audience involved.

But it is difficult to measure such scale for a student who has only learned one way to introduce their formal writing, and who has furthermore not had enough experience in writing. In those cases, the feeling for fitting generality and audience is off. In an informative paper about how Google functions, the first sentence will describe how the internet functions. In an analytical paper studying the way gender is used in briefs on internet policy and privacy, the first sentence will allude to the simpler time of the 80s. Also, in an effort to supply the right beginning, outright errors will present themselves, like the well-known cop-out, "Since the beginning of time..."

No.

What it took me a long time to learn about the inverted paragraph structure, and what directly helped me with the scale problem, was that even the first sentence is focused. It is intentional. It refers to categories I'll later be using. There's got to be a hook and some logic that's relevant and accessible to my audience. Summarily, it has to have the context of both the reader and the rest of the paper to really be written effectively. With all that in mind, it should be one of the last, if not the last sentence written.


Subsequently, I now know that there are a variety of ways of starting a paper. Sometimes, starting with some topical facts or an anecdote can be more useful. Sometimes, starting with the thesis statement itself is a good move. After a while it's easy to know what to use based on the genre and audience. Sometimes I still write an introduction in a couple of different styles, just to see which way works best.

I've periodically left days open to work on these things in the schedule. Looks like this will be one of the sessions.

Can one impart all of this in an hour's time? No. But I think that the key here is experimentation. Flex the writing. Have a few forms in mind, and try them out to see which best accomplishes an introduction to the paper for the intended audience. This should be the most naturally sounding part of a paper; yet, to be a good one, it often takes the most work. My approach will be some combination of explaining the forms, studying bad examples, and modeling good habits in revision.