How To Introduce An Essay

Having a well-written introduction is critical to a successful essay.

From that early age, I learned the importance of money management and the math skills involved.

I learned that there were four quarters in a dollar, and if I bought a non-food item—like a handful of balloons—that I was going to need to come up with six cents for every dollar I spent.

In such a pyramid, you begin by presenting a broad introduction to the topic and end by making a more focused point about that topic in your thesis statement.

The introduction has three essential parts, each of which serves a particular purpose.

Then you might have one or more paragraphs that provide background on the main topics of the paper and present the overall argument, concluding with your thesis statement.

Below is a sample of an introduction that is less effective because it doesn’t apply the principles discussed above. Some people use math on the job as adults, and others used math when they were kids.[4]Despite these criticisms, there does appear to be a strong correlation between pumpkin patches and rat populations, with Ratsmith documenting numerous pumpkin–rat colonies across North America, leading to the conclusion that pumpkins and rats are indeed "nature's best friends" (2008). Check out MLA Formatting and MLA Style: An Introduction Your instructor has asked you to format your term paper using Modern Language Association (MLA) style.You feel confident enough to gather your thoughts in order to produce the paper, but you have never heard of MLA style—do you panic or do you research MLA style and MLA formatting?Every essay or assignment you write must begin with an introduction.It might be helpful to think of the introduction as an inverted pyramid.If you are still unsure about your introduction, our essay editors would love to give you some feedback.[1] According to Paul Ratsmith, the tenuous, but nonetheless important, relationship between pumpkins and rats is little understood: "While I've always been fascinated by this natural kinship, the connection between pumpkins and rats has been the subject of few, if any, other studies" (2008).Instead, you might try to make the reader see why this is such an important topic to discuss.Finally, this sample introduction is lacking a clear thesis statement.Although for short essays the introduction is usually just one paragraph, longer argument or research papers may require a more substantial introduction.The first paragraph might consist of just the attention grabber and some narrative about the problem.