Your first two paragraphs are crucial for establishing your tone, your high writing quality, and your essay structure so let's look at a successful model. First, the attention-getting introduction is commonly in the form of an anecdote, followed by the thesis paragraph with your main purpose and four mapping statements. These crucial first two paragraphs are often called "The Set Up." Notice how the following sample's first sentence in the second paragraph provides a transition between the introduction and the thesis paragraph. Here is the example:
Faustian Bargains in the Short Stories of Tobias Wolff
As an infant I had assigned the name Geekee to my favorite blanket. Tattered and pee-stained, Geekee was my prize possession, my cocoon of silvery spun silk, which I carried with me every where I went for my first four years on this planet. At night, I rubbed the blanket’s corners on my cheek, the pleasant tickling sensation lulling me to sleep. To my consternation, my parents were not as enamored with Geekee as I was. They complained that Geekee smelled. It was threadbare. It had visible stains that I paraded to the public who must have believed that my parents were too cheap to buy me a new blanket. At four years of age I had “outgrown” Geekee, they said, and it was time Geekee and I part ways. Every time they suggested getting rid of it, I would go into a rage that would not subside until they dropped the business of me losing Geekee. This battle between my parents and me continued until one day, as we were moving across the country from Florida to California my father slyly opened his window and told me to look out the window opposite his, for he said there was a baby alligator on the side of the road. As I looked in vain to spot the alligator, my father ripped Geekee from my hands and threw it out his open window. It all happened so fast that I didn’t know my father had grabbed my blanket. Instead, I believed his lie that the powerful wind had sucked Geekee from my grasp and had flung the blanket out of the window. I told my father to stop the car at once. We had to retrieve Geekee. But my father said we had to keep on going. Besides, he said, Geekee was now keeping the baby alligator warm. With no mother to fend for him, the little reptile needed the blanket’s warmth far more than I did. Imagining the baby alligator swathed in my blanket consoled me somewhat. At least Geekee had not gone to waste. While losing Geekee had caused a minor trauma, I got over the loss in a day or two.
Everyone has had some form of a Geekee or other, something that comforts us because of the familiarity and the attachment we have formed with it. But security blankets such as a child’s literal blanket are easy to identify. As the short fiction of Tobias Wolff shows us, there are other security blankets, far more insidious, that often confine or cripple us without our knowing it so that our dependence on them becomes in essence a Faustian Bargain. To better understand these types of security blankets, we should break them down into four categories. First, there is “the tiger’s claw beneath the velvet carpet,” the comfortable sanctuary that is killing us even as we coast along our stagnant existence without any apparent suffering and therefore have no motivation for change. Second, there is the power symbol, which becomes so important to our sense of status and identity that we coddle it at the expense of respecting others. Third, there are props we rely on because these props, we believe, flatter us and make us more appealing to others. These props could include a particular wardrobe, a mustache, spiked hair or anything we believe gives us a “special look” that flatters us. These props may have increased our cachet at one time, but over time those who are dependent on their props eventually become pathetic parodies of themselves. Fourth, there are those who are so oblivious to their dependence on security blankets that their entire existence can be defined by a vast network of security blankets from which these dependent souls are forever entangled.
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