Working on an argumentative essay? In completing an essay that will in the end justify your stand and opinion on a matter, capturing the reader’s attention with a hook makes sense. You will find this article to be of great help if your teacher asked you to revise an introduction to your argumentative essay because it was not captivating enough. Coming up with a good start in writing an argumentative essay is one of the most difficult activities in such writing for one will find themselves doing the introduction part over and over again such that in the end, one is likely to become too exhausted to complete the remaining parts of the essay.
The purpose of this article is to explain how to write a hook for an argumentative essay.
What is a hook in essay writing?
In an argumentative essay, a hook a catchy statement usually appearing as the initial sentence used as the introduction part of it. Its role is to lock the reader into the entire paper. This part of the whole initial paragraph of the paper will either qualify it or destroy the whole work therein. Nevertheless, your instructor or general teacher will naturally get interested in going through your argument in the preceding paragraphs only if you create a very interesting hook.
It should however be noted that a hook is never the introduction of an essay but rather a part of it. Therefore, when writing the hook, one needs to be very creative to capture the attention of the audience and this will naturally enable them to read the rest of the story.
How to Write a Hook for an Argumentative Essay?
The following are six best strategies to write a great hook for an argumentative essay:
1. Ask a question
Questions usually capture the attention of the readers and influence their interest in reading one’s essay but as long as the question is not offensive or bad.
If let us say for example one is writing about Facebook.
Broad questions such as “Is Facebook bad?” sometimes may appear ambiguous to readers because everyone is already aware of its specifics and such will have no effect in capturing the attention and interest of any reader.
Any writer is therefore advised to write questions that will help engage the readers by encouraging their critical thinking rather than those questions that are rather rhetoric and only confines a reader to a yes or no as the response. It is therefore imperative to think about rhetoric as a secret tool if one is to start a hook using questions. In other words, the question used should naturally engage the reader in an argument.
2. Use statistics
They are usually very important in capturing the attention of readers by stimulating inquiry more so if used in writings that are persuasive since they provide information and facts that were never known to the readers before. Such new facts can foster the interest of the reader in your work till the end since they get to know about things they never knew before.
However, writers are advised to be collecting such statistics and facts right and ensure their credibility before using them in their essay works. They should always remember to state the source of their statistics in very clear terms.
The source of such statistics is not only important to readers but also to the writer” work since their teacher will also need it as a reference for their work.
3. Start with a powerful quote
It should be noted that we are not supporting the starting essays using quotations but if the citation is that of an argument, starting off using a quote may serve as the best hook for the writing. The quote must be relevant to the topic and consistent with the statement of the thesis. Young writers are discouraged from using quotations when starting argumentative essays because they represent the ideas of other people/authors and that they affect self-expression and innovation.
However, one may use a quotation to capture the attention of their audience if the quote is not very obvious and has not been used over and over again. This, therefore, calls for thorough research to get relevant but uncommon quotes.
4. Tell a story
It has been argued that stories are most desired for descriptive narrations though it has been tested and established that they can be very appealing when used to start an argumentative essay. Due to the very limited time available for the narrations, such opening stories should be short and comprehensive. It should be noted that the story shared agrees with the theme.
Arguments should not have sentiments that portray personal feelings unless otherwise instructed to use such sentiments such as first-person pronouns.
5. Use a common misconception
Since it is expected that a strong hook captures the attention of the audience, it may make sense to add a common misconceptions when starting the paper. These common misconceptions are simply ideas, events, people, and beliefs that people hold to be true but in the real sense, they are not true. Therefore, if one uses a hook that somehow seems to create misunderstanding their stories capture the attention of their audience.
Starting your argumentative essay with such stories will create the urge in your audience to want to read the whole article to get to know what happened in the end.
6. Get argumentative essay writing help
Contracting someone else to write your argumentative essay hook is often not a bad idea. Best companies such as Academeter will practically deliver better quality papers than an average student would. We still encourage learners to contact our writers to assist them in writing their argumentative essay because completing such assignments on your own could be very challenging and difficult.