Critical Thinking Assessment for Next Essay
Assessment One: Your Introduction Paragraph
A problem is identified or introduced clearly and with all relevant information necessary for full understanding.
Recommended Method:
Write an introduction with a single-sentence definition of a general problem, an outstanding illustration, and a transition to your thesis, which will address the problem in a more specific way as it pertains to the story.
Assessment Two: Your Thesis and Body Paragraphs
Analysis, solution, or plan presents full, comparative, or original perspective.
Recommended Method:
Use an argumentative (with counterarguments) or cause and effect analysis thesis.
Assessment Three: Your Conclusion
Conclusion or synthesis is logical, well-informed, and strongly connected to relevant information.
Recommended Method:
Rewrite your thesis with an emphasis on emotional impact and showing the broader social and psychological ramifications of your argument or analysis. You can also do a "full circle" conclusion that returns to the illustration you used in your introduction paragraph. See the conclusion paragraph at Harvard Writing Center.
Problems to Define and Illustrate in Your Introduction Paragraph
"The Other Woman": Lack of metacognition accompanies a dangerous abundance of self-deception. Clearly, you may want to define metacognition.
"You're Ugly, Too": Maladaptation makes us our own worst enemies.
"Greenleaf": Pride isolates us and creates a series of related pathologies that eventually ruin us.
"Where I'm Calling From": Alcoholism in the story points to a variety of problems: lack of metacognition, maladaptation, pride, self-deception, and self-sabotage.
"A Country Husband": What is a perpetual adolescent or a man-child?
"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?": How does the story critique the cult of perpetual adolescence?
"Defender of the Faith": Define the conflict between tribalistic morality and individual morality.
To Avoid Comma Splices, Know the Difference Between Coordinating Conjunctions (FANBOYS) and Conjunctive Adverbs
Examples
Jerry ate ten pizzas a week. Nonetheless, he remained skinny.
Jerry ate ten pizzas a week, but he remained skinny.
Barbara didn't buy the BMW. Instead, she bought the Acura.
Barbara didn't buy the BMW, yet she did buy the Acura.
Steve wasn't interested in college. Moreover, he didn't want to work full-time.
Steve wasn't interested in college, and he didn't want to work full-time.
I don't want you to pay me back the hundred dollars you owe me. However, I do want you to help me do my taxes.
I don't want you to pay me back the hundred dollars you owe me, but I do want you to help me do my taxes.
I don't want you to pay me back the hundred dollars you owe me, but I do, however, want you to help me do my taxes.
I feel that our relationship has become stale, stagnant, and turgid. Consequently, I think we should break up.
I feel that our relationship has become stale, stagnant, and turgid, so I think we should break up.
Students hate reading. Therefore, they must be tested with closed-book reading exams.
Students hate reading, so they must be tested with closed-book reading exams.
Avoiding Comma Splices and Run-Ons
Fused (run-on) sentence
Klee's paintings seem simple, they are very sophisticated.
She doubted the value of medication she decided to try it once.
A fused sentence (also called a run-on) joins clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence with no punctuation or words to link them. Fused sentences must be either divided into separate sentences or joined by adding words or punctuation.
Comma Splice
I was strongly attracted to her, she was beautiful and funny.
We hated the meat loaf, the cafeteria served it every Friday.
A comma splice occurs when only a comma separates clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence. To correct a comma splice, you can insert a semicolon or period, connect the clauses with a word such as and or because, or restructure the sentence.
After each sentence, put a “C” for Correct or a “CS” for Comma Splice. If the sentence is a comma splice, rewrite it so that it is correct.
One. Bailey used to eat ten pizzas a day, now he eats a spinach salad for lunch and dinner.
Two. Marco no longer runs on the treadmill, instead he opts for the less injury-causing elliptical trainer.
Three. Running can cause shin splints, which can cause excruciating pain.
Four. Running in the incorrect form can wreak havoc on the knees, slowing down can often correct the problem.
Five. While we live in a society where 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers are on the rise, the reading of books, sad to say, is on the decline.
Six. Facebook is a haven for narcissists, it encourages showing off with selfies and other mundane activities that are ways of showing how great and amazing our lives our, what a sham.
Seven. We live in a society where more and more Americans are consuming 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers, however, those same Americans are reading less and less books.
Eight. Love is a virus from outer space, it tends to become most contagious during April and May.
Nine. The tarantula causes horror in many people, moreover there is a species of tarantula in Brazil, the wandering banana spider, that is the most venomous spider in the world.
Ten. Even though spiders cause many people to recoil with horror, most species are harmless.
Eleven. The high repair costs of European luxury vehicles repelled Amanda from buying such a car, instead she opted for a Japanese-made Lexus.
Twelve. Amanda got a job at the Lexus dealership, now she’s trying to get me a job in the same office.
Thirteen. While consuming several cinnamon buns, a twelve-egg cheese omelet, ten slices of French toast slathered in maple syrup, and a tray of Swedish loganberry crepes topped with a dollop of blueberry jam, I contemplated the very grave possibility that I might be eating my way to a heart attack.
Fourteen. Even though I rank marijuana far less dangerous than most pharmaceutical drugs, alcohol, and other commonly used intoxicants, I find marijuana unappealing for a host of reasons, not the least of which is its potential for radically degrading brain cells, its enormous effect on stimulating the appetite, resulting in obesity, and its capacity for over-relaxing many people so that they lose significant motivation to achieve their primary goals, opting instead for a life of sloth and intractable indolence.
Commentary for Flannery O'Connor's "Greenleaf"
Sitting Bee Short Story Analysis
Response essay on Tokyopatrick blogspot
"Fiction as Theological Parable"
Sin of Pride in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction
We see 7 forms of pride.
One. We refuse to cut our losses in an untenable situation.
We are majoring in something at college, and we realize we hate our major, but rather than cut our losses we slog through to prove everyone that we know what we’re doing.
We wouldn’t want people to think we were capable of being misguided or misled. We’re too smart for that.
Who cares that our college major is so odious and disgusting that we our dying inside? Who cares that to finish this college major is equivalent to taking a knife and stabbing ourselves in the heart? At least, everyone thinks we’re crystal clear in our career objectives. That’s all that counts.
Or we are about to marry someone we realize we have no real passion for. “Well, I can’t just walk away now. I’ve invested seven years of my life in this person. That’s a huge investment and I demand dividends. Who cares that every time I’m with this person I feel like sticking my head inside a pencil sharpener. What counts is that “I don’t give up. I’m not a quitter. I don’t need to love someone to marry that person. What the hell is love anyway? That’s just a fleeting feeling. Feelings don’t last. Investments do. And, dammit, my relationship is an investment in my future.”
Two. We refuse to admit wrongdoing.
Rather than own our mistakes, we sulk, become passive-aggressive, and show resentment toward others for not being sensitive to our plight.
For example, you bought crappy airline tickets from some crappy airline, contrary to your friend’s advice, and now you and your girlfriend are stuck at the airport for 3 days and you miss the high school reunion. Rather than admit you’re wrong, you act like everything is your girlfriend’s fault. You divert the discussion away from your wrongdoing and start bringing up stuff your girlfriend did three years ago. True or not, what your girlfriend did three years ago is irrelevant to the fact that you screwed up in the here and now.
Three. We assert the myth of self-sufficiency.
We are all mutually dependent on the other for our safety, goods, services, human relationships, art, culture, etc. But there is a type of proud person who says, “I’m doing fine by myself. I don’t need anyone’s help. I’m better off on my own. People rain on my parade. People clip my wings and don’t allow me to spread my wings and fly.
These clipped crippled eagles blame everyone in the world for their being earthbound, but they are the real reason they can’t fly to the sky and fulfill their dreams. However, facing the fact that they are their own worst enemy would be too damaging to their pride.
Four. We assert a superior depth of feeling to all others that encourages us to coddle our self-pity.
“I know we’re all grieving over the death of our beloved uncle. But it’s harder on me because I feel his death more than everyone else. My sensitivity, my depth of feeling, and my capacity for sorrow are all superior to my family members. They simply cannot understand what I’m going through.”
“I know we’ve all been dumped by our girlfriend. But this is more devastating to me than anyone else because the depth of love I had for her overshadows anyone else’s love and I feel heartbreak more than the average person. I’ve got a long road ahead of me. You can go to the party without me. In fact, don’t bother calling me. I’ll be bedridden for the next seven years or so.”
Five. We assert our unusual degree of victimization as a mitigating excuse for our deplorable behavior.
Rather than admit wrongdoing, we claim that we were “acting out” due to some trauma that we cannot control.
A man cheats on his wife, and upon being discovered he tells her his cheating was not his fault; rather, his cheating was the result of a bad childhood that left him “with self-esteem issues” necessitating that he “seek validation in illicit affairs.”
Six. We spite others even though we are also inflicting wounds upon ourselves.
A beautiful girl in her late teens saddles up with a ugly, obnoxious slob of a boyfriend. The grotesque boyfriend is a ne’er-do-well. Neither working or in school, this feckless character sports thick flakes of dandruff, dirty fingernails, and rancid halitosis due to a lack of oral hygiene. He lives at his girlfriend’s parents’ house, sitting in the father’s prized living room chair, where the scrofulous boyfriend scratches his itchy armpits, drinks the father’s beer, and watches TV all day.
The girlfriend dislikes her boyfriend, but dislikes her father even more. All her life, she has found her father a toxic presence, providing effrontery toward her every dream and aspiration. Rather than try to develop a rational conversation with her father, she decides to spite him by dating a malodorous troll, who in effect becomes a proxy for her hostility toward her father. Deep down, the beautiful girl knows the putrid hobgoblin is an impediment to her hopes and dreams, but her pride refuses to let go of this foul-breathed proxy who exacts punishment against her father.
Seven. We need to assert an elevated image to others while showing reckless disregard for the true content of our character.
Our pride makes us want to be the hero, the saint, the martyr, the do-gooder, the social activist, the hard worker, and the concerned citizen in the eyes of the public, but we ignore building the very character traits that result in these things. We want the ends, but we don’t want to take the journey to get to those ends because we’re shallow and phony.
Study Questions for “Greenleaf” by Flannery O’Connor
One. Discuss the symbolism of the bull when Mrs. May screams at him.
We read the bull was “like some patient god come down to woo her.” He has a “wreath across his horns.”
A few paragraphs later, we read that the bull’s “wreath slipped down to the base of his horns where it looked like a menacing prickly crown.”
These are images of Jesus Christ who wore a crown of thorns.
The racist Mrs. May screams a racial epithet and expresses not just her racism but also her animosity toward God, or more specifically for the Catholic writer O’Connor, Jesus Christ.
The unrepentant sinner is hostile in the presence of God and recoils like a snake. Much of this hostility is rooted in pride, the idea that “I’m good enough by myself and I don’t need anyone how to tell me to run my life.” Pride is a closing off from others and God and represents a retreat into self--solipsism. We can define solipsism as the insanity that results from extreme self-centeredness.
Part of being sane is acknowledging our mutual interdependence on the human race. We are not gods lording over idiots. If we think so, then we are the idiot.
Bull as Symbol
The bull, at least from Mrs. May’s point of view, is eating the house. She feels invaded as if her very house, the very foundation of her life, is being eviscerated and feeling threatened she lashes out.
Mrs. May is defensive and hostile and her hostility opens a window into her soul's deepest vulnerabilities. We will find that she is lonely and full of despair, but hides her helplessness behind a facade of proud grandiosity. Like Zoe in the short story, "You're Ugly, Too," her wall of grandiosity imprisons her.
Wall of Grandiosity and Facebook
Facebook is place where everyone talks about how great their life is. Very few Facebook posters talk about how horrible their life is. Facebook is, more often than not, a place for people to boast and to humblebrag about their "amazing" lives. This fiction becomes their delusion and their prison.
Mrs. May is similar to these Facebook posters in that she constantly elevates herself and tries to see herself as a superior person to others, and this prison repels the truth from coming into her world so that she can change for the better.
As a woman of faith who learned to distrust pride, the author Flannery O'Connor wants to portray Mrs. May in this way, as a prisoner of her pride and the delusions that are born from that pride.
Two. After wanting to wake up Mr. Greenleaf, the house worker, Mrs. May decides against it. Why?
She knows Mr. Greenleaf will question why her grown boys would let their mother get up at night and do the errand of calling on Mr. Greenleaf. Such a question challenges Mrs. May's prideful delusion that her sons are better than Mr. Greenleaf's.
That her boys would not do such an errand speaks to their incorrigible irresponsibility, stunted emotional growth, and general spiritual apathy that makes them ne’er-do-wells. They make Mrs. May's life a living hell and speak to her own sense of failure, a wound that she tries to hide behind her obnoxious pride.
That they are ne’er-do-wells or sloths speaks to Mrs. May’s own failure as a mother, and as a woman of immense and supreme pride she does not want to be even implicitly reprimanded for her maternal failures. In fact, Mrs. May is a fool to deny her failures. Wise people know that failures can help us. They can be learning tools. They can be agents of change. Marc Maron said you haven't really learned anything in life until someone has handed you your ____ on a stick. Failure and humiliation can be wake up calls to get off our butts and make the necessary changes in our lives.
Because Mrs. May has never experienced real love, with herself and with her own children, she offers herself cheap consolation such as boasting to herself about how great she is. For example, to obscure the failure of her sons, she gloats by taking glory for Mr. Greenleaf’s sons. She thinks, “that if the Greenleaf boys had risen in the world it was because she had given their father employment when no one else would have him.”
Three. Address the theme of self-delusion in Mrs. May—how she has a perception of herself that contradicts her true self.
She believes she is doing Mr. Greenleaf a favor by keeping him employed when in fact “she has a thing for him.” But she could never admit this to herself. She cannot confront her loneliness and her hunger for love and companionship. Her boys treat her like garbage, and she doesn't know how to deal with that except through denial. But the wound inside her grows and festers day by day. She is an open wound, an open infection.
Additionally, she sees herself as someone in control and someone who is superior to the confederacy of dunces that surround her. Of course, her life is the opposite of the way she perceives herself.
In fact, she is a frightened woman who hides her fears behind her pride. Her fears are over her vulnerability, her disconnection to her sons, her disconnection to herself, and her precarious hold on reality. Her pride makes her a crazed human being.
Her pride prevents her from seeing the above. She needs help, yet sees herself as a composed, superior figure.
Part of her vulnerability is that her sons don’t respect her, or respect life at all for that matter. And she must bear witness to their disintegrating personalities, which eats away at her day by day.
In the story we read that when Mrs. May tells her oldest son Scofield to get a better insurance job, so he can marry a “nice girl,” he says, “Why Mamma, I’m not going to marry until you’re dead and gone and then I’m going to marry me some nice fat farm girl that can take over this place!” He's a demon child.
She’s afraid her sons “will marry trash and ruin everything I’ve done.” In fact, her sons already have souls of trash.
Later in the story, we find that Mr. Greenleaf’s wife, who engages in “prayer healing,” screams Jesus over and over so that Mrs. May “felt as if some violent unleashed force had broken out of the ground and was charging toward her.”
In Flannery O’Connor’s religious view, God charges us. He is an active participant in our salvation and some meet in the middle while others, like Mrs. May, recoil like snakes and run the other way.
Four. How does Mrs. May’s attitude reveal her to be a phony?
We read that she sees herself as “a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.”
Religion for Mrs. May is a costume of respectability, a way to achieve outward appearances.
Five. What other sin afflicts Mrs. May?
In addition to pride and vanity, Mrs. May suffers from the sin of envy, the resentment toward others whom she perceives to enjoy a superior life to the one she leads.
For example, she resents O.T. and E.T., the twin sons of Mr. Greenleaf, who are “energetic” and ambitious and successful. However, Mrs. May dismisses their success by saying they were dependent on her kindness and World War II, which afforded them military benefits to go to the university.
Mrs. May sees the above as negative: The US taxpayers were paying for their French wives, she thinks.
They provide a stark contrast to her morally toxic sons, the youngest who is also sickly, a lugubrious “intellectual,” a term that is used as a pejorative.
Over and over, we see the sons are bitterly sarcastic and mean-spirited toward their mother.
We read that “Scofield only exasperated her beyond endurance but Wesley caused her real anxiety.” Wesley doesn’t like anything. He seems like a walking corpse who as a misanthrope hates the world.
Wesley complains how he hates his life and his surroundings, but he doesn’t go anywhere or lift a finger to change his situation.
He denigrates his mother. At one point, he says sarcastically to admonish his mother for harping on him finding a wife, “Well, why don’t you do something practical, woman? Why don’t you pray for me like Mrs. Greenleaf would?”
In another scene, Wesley says, “I wouldn’t milk a cow to save your soul from hell.”
The boys are sick of their mom saying, “When I die . . .” because they seem to wish she really would die and resent her for looking so healthy that death is too far away from her.
We also read they are demonically possessed in the scene where they argue at the kitchen table. We read that Scofield becomes grotesque: “His brother’s pleasant face had changed so that an ugly family resemblance showed between them.”
It appears Mrs. May’s sins have infected her children with her spiritual disease.
They suffer spiritual extinction or acedia and languish through life without purpose or meaning (their acedia or “slacker disease,” contrasts in some ways with consumerism disease in “The Country Husband”).
Furthermore, the sons suffer from the classic case of spoiled kid syndrome: children who resent the very parents that enable them and that never taught them responsibility or accountability.
Six. What motives drive Mrs. May’s insistence that the bull be killed?
She wants to spite Mr. Greenleaf’s twin sons because she envies them. They are the antithesis of her devil boys.
We read she has been “working continuously for fifteen years” and she is tired, but her fatigue is the real work she does in her life: spiting and envying others while puffing herself up with pride.
Seven. How does the religious allegory conclude the story?
When the bull pierces her heart, we read that she is like Dracula encountering the Cross: “She continued to stare straight ahead but the entire scene in front of her had changed—the tree line was a dark wound in a world that was nothing but sky—and she had the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable.”
Eight. What disease consumes Mrs. May?
Mrs. May’s disease is spiritual and consuming, eating her from the inside. She is rotting.
We can call her disease victimization.
The distinguishing characteristics of victimization are the following:
- You always blame and scapegoat others for your misery rather than taking responsibility for your own actions.
- You suffer from a superiority complex in which you see yourself as a genius surrounded by a Confederacy of Dunces when in fact your self-image is an illusion. Your grandeur points to your delusional state of mind.
- Your sense of grandeur also points to your pride, which repels instruction, wisdom, and necessary change.
- Your sense that you are a victim while observing others living a life that is better than yours consumes you with bitterness and resentment. These toxins eat you from the inside out.
- You feel so invested in your victimization that evidence contrary to your delusions has no effect on you. You need to vindicate your bitter emotions by playing out your role as the victim.
- The energy you devote to being a victim is GREATER than the energy you could use to improve your life.
- The cause of your victimization is egotism or narcissism, the belief that you and your problems are special and burden you on a remarkable and grand scale.
The Sin of Pride in Flannery O’Connor’s “Greenleaf”
I’m teaching a story next semester by Flannery O’Connor. It’s called “Greenleaf” and it was included in The Best Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike.
The story is about a sour woman, Mrs, May, a widow with two grown sons on a ranch, both of whom hate her guts and treat her miserably. Neither has a girlfriend or any kind of prospect for marriage.
Mrs. May is what we could call the Grandma Sour Pants archetype. She thinks she’s smarter and classier than everyone else.
She thinks everyone around her is getting a free ride while she gets an unfair shake.
She has no core morality other than to keep up appearances.
Her two convictions in life are her own vanity and the belief that she is a victim of an unfair universe that rewards idiots and punishes a superior person like herself.
Not surprisingly, she’s bitter and this bitterness consumes her from the inside out.
Bitterness on this colossal scale is a spiritual disease that eats us like corrosive battery acid.
It spreads to other members of the family. Mrs. May’s sons are clearly diseased as well.
The question is does she choose to be diseased by bitterness and misery or does the bitterness present itself as a compulsion?
The answer is probably a bit of both. She both chooses to be miserable and feels compelled to do so.
She’s made some decision along the way that being miserable is the appropriate response to her life circumstances.
She has the right to feel angry that her boys are grotesque shriveled souls who cannot love or find love in their lives.
She feels she has the right to be angry that her handyman Mr. Greenleaf has two sons who, after getting out of the army, went to college and did well for themselves, even marrying some French women.
She got the bad end of the bargain in her analysis.
But she’s blind to the fact that her Enemy isn’t life’s circumstances but her own moral hypocrisy, narcissism, entitlement, and pride.
She seems unwilling or unable to make an honest critique of herself.
She appears smart enough for analysis. The problem is her emotional state.
O’Connor, a Catholic writer who writes from a very strong Catholic point of view, sees Mrs. May’s problem from the Sin of Pride.
Pride creates a lot of problems. One that stands out is we’d rather be miserable than admit we’re wrong in our actions and/or our disposition toward life.
Mrs. May would rather be miserable than admit she spoiled her children. She enabled them and in doing so they lack the maturity to love. They are impotent.
One of my favorite characters from television is George Costanza from Seinfeld. There’s a scene where he’s in the diner telling Jerry he can’t stand his girlfriend and he can’t stand being in a relationship.
Pride as a disease has five distinguishing characteristics:
Number one, you asserted this elevated grandeur or superiority about yourself based on a false premise: wealth, youth, beauty, economic and social class, materialism, taste, your intellect.
Number two, you feel that you are a victim, that all your problems are the world’s fault because you’re a misunderstood genius surrounded by a Confederacy of Dunces. Additionally, your problems are special and unique and no one can understand them. No one can feel your victimization as powerfully as you can.
Number three, you are blind to the fact that you are your own worst enemy. Rather than take accountability, you scapegoat others for all your problems.
Number four, your pride prevents you from admitting wrongdoing or making mistakes so you’d rather suffer in your pride than come clean.
Number five, your pride is so entrenched that you don’t come clean and admit you’re wrong until you’ve hit rock bottom and have had your butt handed to you on a stick.
Essay Option #5 for Flannery O'Connor's "Greenleaf" using argumentation:
Support, refute, or complicate the argument that O'Connor's religious faith, which is so flagrant in the story, does not compromise but in fact strengthens her cautionary tale about the dangers of pride and how those of us mired in pride are a "damned lot" doomed to languish in our own private hell.
Writing Effective Introduction Paragraphs for Your Essays
Weak Introductions to Avoid
One. Don’t use overused quotes:
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
“My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”
“To be or not to be, that is the question.”
Two. Don’t use pretentious, grandiose, overwrought, bloated, self-regarding, clichéd, unintentionally funny openings:
Since the Dawn of Man, people have sought love and happiness . . .
In today’s society, we see more and more people cocooning in their homes . . .
Man has always wondered why happiness and contentment are so elusive like trying to grasp a bar of sudsy, wet soap.
We have now arrived at a Societal Epoch where we no longer truly communicate with one another as we have embarked upon the full-time task of self-aggrandizement through the social media of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et al.
In this modern world we face a new existential crisis with the advent of newfangled technologies rendering us razzle-dazzled with the overwhelming possibilities of digital splendor on one hand and painfully dislocated and lonely with our noses constantly rubbing our digital screens on the other.
Since Adam and Eve traipsed across the luxuriant Garden of Eden searching for the juicy, succulent Adriatic fig only to find it withered under the attack of mites, ants, and fruit flies, mankind has embarked upon the quest for the perfect pesticide.
Three. Never apologize to the reader:
Sorry for these half-baked chicken scratch thoughts. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and I didn’t have sufficient time to do the necessary research for the topic you assigned me.
I’m hardly an expert on this subject and I don’t know why anyone would take me seriously, but here it goes.
Forgive me but after over-indulging last night at HomeTown Buffet my brain has been rendered in a mindless fog and the ramblings of this essay prove to be rather incoherent.
Four. Don’t throw a thesis cream pie in your reader’s face.
In this essay I am going to prove to you why Americans will never buy those stupid automatic cars that don’t need a driver. The four supports that will support my thesis are ______________, ______________, _______________, and ________________.
It is my purpose in this essay to show you why I'm correct on the subject of the death penalty. My proofs will be _________, _______, _________, and ___________.
Five. Don’t use a dictionary definition (standard procedure for a sixth grade essay but not college in which you should use more sophisticated methods such as extended definition or expert definitions):
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines metacognition as “awareness or analysis of one’s own learning or thinking process.”
General Principles of an Effective Introduction Paragraph
It piques your readers’ interest (often called a “hook”).
It is compelling.
It is timely.
It is relevant to the human condition and to your topic.
It transitions to your topic and/or thesis.
The Ten Types of Paragraph Introductions
One. Use a blunt statement of fact or insight that captures your readers’ attention:
It's good for us to have our feelings hurt.
Hanging out on Facebook is like eating Twinkies.
Men who are jealous are cheaters.
We would assume that jealous men are obsessed with fidelity, but in fact the most salient feature of the jealous man is that he is more often than not cheating on his partner. His jealousy results from projecting his own infidelities on his partner. He says to himself, “I am a cheater and therefore so is she.” We see this sick mentality in the character Dan from Ha Jin’s “The Beauty.” Trapped in his jealousy, Dan embodies the pathological characteristics of learned helplessness evidenced by ___________, _______________, ________________, and _______________.
John Taylor Gatto opens his essay “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why” as thus:
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in the world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: Their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teacher’s lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn’t get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
Gatto goes on to argue in his thesis that school trains children to be servants for mediocre (at best) jobs when school should be teaching innovation, individuality, and leadership roles.
Two. Write a definition based on the principles of extended definition (term, class, distinguishing characteristics) or quote an expert in a field of study:
Metacognition is an essential asset to mature people characterized by their ability to value long-term gratification over short-term gratification, their ability to distance themselves from their passions when they’re in a heated emotional state, their ability to stand back and see the forest instead of the trees, and their ability to continuously make assessments of the effectiveness of their major life choices. In the fiction of John Cheever and James Lasdun, we encounter characters that are woefully lacking in metacognition evidenced by _____________, ______________, _____________, and _______________.
According to Alexander Batthanany, member of the Viktor Frankl Institute, logotherapy, which is the search for meaning, “is identified as the primary motivational force in human beings.” Batthanany further explains that logotherapy is “based on three philosophical and psychological concepts: Freedom of Will, Will to Meaning, and Meaning in Life.” Embracing the concepts of logotherapy is vastly more effective than conventional, Freud-based psychotherapy when we consider ________________, ______________, __________________, and ________________.
Three. Use an insightful quotation that has not, to your knowledge anyway, been overused:
George Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two great tragedies in life. The first is not getting what we want. The second is getting it.” Shaw’s insight speaks to the tantalizing chimera, that elusive quest we take for the Mythic She-Beast who becomes are life-altering obsession. As the characters in John Cheever and James Lasdun’s fiction show, the human relationship with the chimera is source of paradox. On one hand, having a chimera will kill us. On the other, not having a chimera will kill us. Cheever and Lasdun’s characters twist and torment under the paradoxical forces of their chimeras evidenced by _____________, _______________, ______________, and __________________.
Four. Use a startling fact to get your reader’s attention:
There are currently more African-American men in prison than there were slaves at the peak of slavery in the United States. We read this disturbing fact in Michelle Alexander’s magisterial The New Jim Crow, which convincingly argues that America’s prison complex is perpetuating the racism of slavery and Jim Crow in several insidious ways.
Five. Use an anecdote (personal or otherwise) to get your reader’s attention:
One afternoon I was napping under the covers when Lara walked into the room talking on the phone to her friend, Hannah. She didn’t know I was in the room, confusing the mound on the bed with a clump of pillows and blankets. I heard her whisper to Hannah, “I found another small package from eBay. He’s buying watches and not telling me.”
That’s when I thought about getting a post office box.
This could be the opening introduction for an essay topic about “economic infidelity.”
As we read in Stephen King’s essay “Write or Die”:
“Hardly a week after being sprung from detention hall, I was once more invited to step down to the principal’s office. I went with a sinking heart, wondering what new sh** I’d stepped in.”
Six. Use a piece of vivid description or a vivid illustration to get your reader’s attention:
My gym looks like an enchanting fitness dome, an extravaganza of taut, sweaty bodies adorned in fluorescent spandex tights contorting on space-age cardio machines, oil-slicked skin shrouded in a synthetic fog of dry ice colored by the dizzying splash of lavender disco lights. Tribal drum music plays loudly. Bottled water flows freely, as if from some Elysian spring, over burnished flesh. The communal purgation appeals to me. My fellow cardio junkies and I are so self-abandoned, free, and euphoric, liberated in our gym paradise.
But right next to our workout heaven is a gastronomical inferno, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets, part of a chain, which is, to my lament, sprouting all over Los Angeles. I despise the buffet, a trough for people of less discriminating tastes who saunter in and out of the restaurant at all hours, entering the doors of the eatery without shame and blind to all the gastrointestinal and health-related horrors that await them. Many of the patrons cannot walk out of their cars to the buffet but have to limp or rely on canes, walkers, wheelchairs, and other ambulatory aids, for it seems a high percentage of the customers are afflicted with obesity, diabetes, arthritis, gout, hypothalamic lesions, elephantiasis, varicose veins and fleshy tumors. Struggling and wheezing as they navigate across the vast parking lot that leads to their gluttonous sanctuary, they seem to worship the very source of their disease.
In front of the buffet is a sign of rules and conduct. One of the rules urges people to stand in the buffet line in an orderly fashion and to be patient because there is plenty of food for everyone. Another rule is that children are not to be left unattended and running freely around the buffet area. My favorite rule is that no hands, tongues, or other body parts are allowed to touch the food. Tongs and other utensils are to be used at all times. The rules give you an idea of the kind of people who eat there. These are people I want to avoid.
But as I walk to the gym from my car, which shares a parking lot with the buffet patrons, I cannot avoid the nauseating smell of stale grease oozing from the buffet’s rear dumpster, army green and stained with splotches and a seaweed-like crust of yellow and brown grime.
Often I see cooks and dishwashers, their bodies covered with soot, coming out of the back kitchen door to throw refuse into the dumpster, a smoldering receptacle with hot fumes of bacteria and flies. Hunchbacked and knobby, the poor employees are old, weary men with sallow, rheumy eyes and cuts and bruises all over their bodies. I imagine them being tortured deep within the bowels of the fiery kitchen on some Medieval rack. They emerge into the blinding sunshine like moles, their eyes squinting, with their plastic garbage bags twice the size of their bodies slung over their shoulders, and then I look into their sad eyes—eyes that seem to beg for my help and mercy. And just when I am about to give them words of hope and consolation or urge them to flee for their lives, it seems they disappear back into the restaurant as if beckoned by some invisible tyrant.
The above could transition to the topic of people of a certain weight being required to buy three airline tickets for an entire row of seats.
Seven. Summarize both sides of a debate.
America is torn by the national healthcare debate. One camp says it’s a crime that 25,000 Americans die unnecessarily each year from treatable disease and that modeling a health system from other developed countries is a moral imperative. However, there is another camp that fears that adopting some version of universal healthcare is tantamount to stepping into the direction of socialism.
Eight. State a misperception, fallacy, or error that your essay will refute.
Americans against universal or national healthcare are quick to say that such a system is “socialist,” “communist,” and “un-American,” but a close look at their rhetoric shows that it is high on knee-jerk, mindless paroxysms and short on reality. Contrary to the enemies of national healthcare, providing universal coverage is very American and compatible with the American brand of capitalism.
Nine. Make a general statement about your topic.
From Sherry Turkle’s essay “How Computers Change the Way We Think”:
The tools we use to think change the ways in which we think. The invention of written language brought about a radical shift in how we process, organize, store, and transmit representations of the world. Although writing remains our primary information technology, today when we think about the impact of technology on our habits of mind, we think primarily of the computer.
Ten. Pose a question your essay will try to answer:
Why are diet books more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more fat?
Why is psychotherapy becoming more and more popular, yet Americans are getting more and more crazy?
Why are the people of Qatar the richest people in the world, yet score at the bottom of all Happiness Index metrics?
Why are courses in the Humanities more essential to your well-being that you might think?
What is the difference between thinking and critical thinking?
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