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How to Write the Ultimate Essay Hook

4-minute read

• 6th May 2023

Never underestimate the power of an essay hook . This opening statement is meant to grab the reader’s attention and convince them to keep reading. But how do you write one that’ll pack a punch? In this article, we’ll break this down.

What Is an Essay Hook?

An essay hook is the first thing your audience will read. If it doesn’t hook them right off the bat, they might decide not to keep reading. It’s important that your opening statement is impactful while not being too wordy or presumptuous.

It’s also crucial that it clearly relates to your topic. You don’t want to mislead your readers into thinking your essay is about something it’s not. So, what kind of essay hook should you write? Here are seven ideas to choose from:

1.   Story

Everyone likes a good story. If an interesting story or anecdote relates to your essay topic, the hook is a great place to include it. For example:

The key to a good story hook is keeping it short and sweet. You’re not writing a novel in addition to an essay!

2.   Fact

Another great essay hook idea is to lay out a compelling fact or statistic. For example:

There are a few things to keep in mind when doing this. Make sure it’s relevant to your topic, accurate, and something your audience will care about. And, of course, be sure to cite your sources properly.

3.   Metaphor or Simile

If you want to get a little more creative with your essay hook, try using a metaphor or simile . A metaphor states that something is something else in a figurative sense, while a simile states that something is like something else.

Metaphors and similes are effective because they provide a visual for your readers, making them think about a concept in a different way. However, be careful not to make them too far-fetched or overly exaggerated.

4.   Question

Asking your audience a question is a great way to hook them. Not only does it make them think, but they’ll also want to keep reading because you will have sparked their curiosity. For example:

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Try to avoid using questions that start with something along the lines of “Have you ever wondered…?” Instead, try to think of a question they may never have wondered about. And be sure not to answer it right away, at least not fully. Use your essay to do that!

5.   Declaration

Making a bold statement or declaring a strong opinion can immediately catch people’s attention. For example:

Regardless of whether your reader agrees with you, they’ll probably want to keep reading to find out how you will back up your claim. Just make sure your declaration isn’t too controversial, or you might scare readers away!

6.   Common Misconception

Laying out a common misconception is another useful way to hook your reader. For example:

If your readers don’t know that a common belief is actually a misconception, they’ll likely be interested in learning more. And if they are already aware, it’s probably a topic they’re interested in, so they’ll want to read more.

7.   Description

You can put your descriptive powers into action with your essay hook. Creating interesting or compelling imagery places your reader into a scene, making the words come alive.

A description can be something beautiful and appealing or emotionally charged and provoking. Either way, descriptive writing is a powerful way to immerse your audience and keep them reading.

When writing an essay, don’t skimp on the essay hook! The opening statement has the potential to convince your audience to hear what you have to say or to let them walk away. We hope our ideas have given you some inspiration.

And once you finish writing your essay, make sure to send it to our editors. We’ll check it for grammar, spelling, word choice, references, and more. Try it out for free today with a 500-word sample !

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How to Write Great Essay Hooks (Tips + Examples)

Table of contents

Yona Schnitzer

Blank screen. Cursor blinks. Clock ticks. Brain freezes.

You stressfully wonder, “How will I ever finish this essay?”

I’ve been there. 

Every time you write an essay, you want to catch your readers’ undivided attention from the very first word. The opening hook has to be *perfect* — no compromises. 

But, instead of reeling under pressure to come up with this elusively perfect essay hook at the eleventh hour, I’ve found a better way to write great essay hooks. 

In this guide, I’ll tell you what it takes to write the most compelling and attention-grabbing hooks. I’ll also break down six awesome types of essay hooks you can experiment with and share examples to inspire your next opening statement.

What is an Essay Hook?

An essay hook is the opening statement of an essay, written to capture readers' attention and nudge them to learn more about the topic. Also known as a lede or lead, this hook introduces readers to the topic/theme of the essay and piques their curiosity to continue reading. 

The hook creates the entire narrative for your essay. It tells readers what to expect from the rest of the essay and creates context around your main argument or thesis statement. 

6 Types of Essay Hooks You Can Experiment With

I’ve created this handy list of six different types of essay hooks. You can choose the one that best fits your essay’s context and create a stellar opening statement within minutes. 

1. Compelling fact or statistic

Lead with evidence and use a powerful fact or statistic as your essay hook. It’s one of the best ways to capture readers’ attention from the start and keep them intrigued throughout your essay. 

For example, if you’re writing about the importance of time management for freelancers, you have two options to create your opening sentence:

Generic : “Managing time as a freelancer is no easy feat.”

Impactful : “Nearly 70% of freelancers struggle to effectively divide and manage their time between multiple clients.” 

This data point, linked to the original research, sets a strong tone for your essay and draws people in to read more. It communicates  

Find a shocking statistic with AI

Finding relevant statistics for any topic is one of the hardest parts of the job. 

But you don't have to spend hours looking for these data points anymore. Wordtune can do this heavy lifting for you in three easy steps.

• Open the Wordtune editor and add your essay title. 
• Type in any content you've written, click on 'Add spice,' and select the 'Expand on' option.
• Write 'statistics,' and Wordtune will add relevant data points to your content.

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2. Bold claim hook

When working on an argumentative essay , I always write with the mindset that nobody has the time to read my thoughts from start to finish. So, I have to get to the point quickly and make a solid argument worth people’s time. 

That's when opening with a bold claim works best. Condense all your views on the topic into a few thought-provoking lines that would make readers go, hmmm…

But remember, you can't open with a claim that people already know and accept as fact. It has to be something original and unique to make your readers tick, nudging them to dive deeper into your essay. 

For example, if you’re writing about water crisis, you have two options to open your essay: 

‍ "In some regions, there is not enough clean water for people to use."

‍ "Imagine a world where every drop of water is a battle, a precious commodity fought over by scores of people and animals alike. This can become a reality as early as 2050."

This bold claim presents a convincing argument about the global water crisis. It also emphasizes the urgency of this argument with a research-backed statistic.

Create a bold claim suggestion using AI

Can’t think of a strong opening sentence for your essay? Wordtune can translate your thoughts into a bold claim and create a compelling essay hook. 

Open your Wordtune editor and write a few lines related to your topic. These sentences should have a consensus among your audience. Then, choose the 'Counterargument' option from the list of suggestions. 

And you’ll have a bold claim for your essay with no effort at all!

3. Story/Anecdote hook

In all my years of writing, I’ve noticed how stories have a unique effect on people. A good story can resonate with a bigger audience, pique their curiosity, and deliver a more personal message. 

That's why you can cite a personal anecdote or talk about a publicly known story as a good hook for your essay. This hook allows you to play with words and work in more storytelling . 

One of my favorite writing tips applies here: enter the scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible. You have to keep it crisp instead of rambling on and on. 

Consider these two examples:

Either of these hooks could work fine if we were just writing a personal essay about a move to a new place. But if we’re specifically writing about the sky, the second example is better. It sticks to the point — the sky and the color of the sky — and doesn’t stray into irrelevant details. 

Create a compelling story with AI

I get it—not all of us are natural storytellers. But you can use AI to your advantage to create a concise and exciting story for your essay.  

Wordtune can help you write a short story from scratch or trim down your writing into a quick anecdote. Click on the expand or shorten button to edit your story any way you like. 

4. Question Hook

Humans have a tendency to immediately look for answers every time they come across fascinating questions. Using questions as essay hooks can reel people into your essay and feed their curiosity.

But questions are also fairly overused in essays. You don't want to use a generic question that makes people say, " Not another question ." 

Instead, think of questions that approach your topic from a fresh angle. This means honing in on what was especially interesting or surprising from your research—and maybe even brainstorming different questions to find the most fascinating one.

For example, if you’re writing about the psychology behind why we buy, you have two options to open your essay:

‍ “Do you know what factors compel us to buy certain things?”

Plugged in :

“Before buying anything, have you ever taken a moment to pause and think about possible reasons driving you to this purchase?”

The latter is more descriptive and creates a realistic scenario for readers to truly think about the topic of the essay.

5. Description hook

A descriptive hook works best when writing an explanatory or opinion-led essay. Descriptive hooks, as the name suggests, illustrate a topic in detail to create context for the essay. It's a good way to build awareness for and educate readers on lesser-known themes.

But a descriptive hook can easily become too plain or unexciting to read. To make it work, you have to write an engaging description using imagery, analogies, and other figures of speech. 

Remember to make your hook reader-friendly by avoiding passive voice, mainstream cliches, and lengthy sentences.

Consider this example:

Describing a sunset is too cliche, so cross that one off the list. Describing the sky as it is on a normal day wouldn't be shocking or unexpected, so scratch that one, too.

This example creates something unique by using analogies to describe the color of the sky and painting a beautiful picture. 

Write a gripping description with AI

Writing an exciting hook for a boring topic is more challenging than it looks. But Wordtune makes it a breeze with just two steps:

• Open the Wordtune editor and write your essay topic.
• Click on Explain or Emphasize and let it work its magic.

You can also change the tone of voice to make the text more in tune with your theme. 

6. Metaphor hook

One of my favorite essay hooks is to open with a persuasive metaphor to contextualize the topic. Metaphors can help you approach the topic from a completely different lens and wow your readers with interesting insight. 

Metaphors are also super versatile to make your writing more impactful. You can write a one-line metaphor or create a scenario comparing one thing to another and linking it to your topic. 

For example, if you’re writing about the experience of working at a startup, you can open your essay with these two options:

Short & sweet: "Joining a startup is like strapping into a rollercoaster: be ready to witness thrilling highs and sinking drops."

Long & descriptive : “Picture a small sailboat navigating the unpredictable winds and tides in a vast ocean. That’s a startup operating in a massive market. And with the right vision, this journey is filled with risks and rewards.” 

Create a convincing metaphor with AI

Writing good metaphors takes up a lot of creative brain power. You can always use Wordtune to find some extra inspiration if you're out of creative ideas. 

Type your opening line in the Wordtune editor and click on the 'Give an analogy' option. You can ask for as many suggestions as you want till you find the best one! 

What to Know About Your Essay (and Topic) Before You Write the Hook

Whether you’re writing a research paper on economics, an argumentative essay for your college composition class, or a personal essay sharing your thoughts on a topic, you need to nail down a few things before you settle on the first line for your essay.

‍ Let me break them down for you. 

1. Gain in-depth knowledge of your topic

Before you start writing your essay, you need to know your topic — not just in name, but in-depth. You don't have to become a subject matter expert overnight. But you do need to research the topic inside out 

Your research will help you:

• Narrow your focus
• Build an argument
• Shape the narrative

Your research insights determine your essay’s structure and guide your choice of hook. 

After organizing your research in a neat outline, think to yourself: ‍Did you uncover a shocking fact? A compelling anecdote? An interesting quote? Any of those things could be your hook.

⚡ ‍ Take action: After finishing your research, review your notes and think through your essay. Mark or make a list of anything compelling enough to be a good lead.

2. Type of essay

In academic settings, there are generally three kinds of essays:

• Argumentative: Making the case for a certain stance or route of action.
• Expository: Explaining the who, what, when, where, why, and how of some phenomenon.
• Narrative: Telling a true story as a way to explore different ideas.

‍ The type of essay you’re writing is key to choosing the best hook for your piece. 

A serious argumentative essay can start with a shocking statistic or a bold claim. And an expository essay can open with a descriptive hook while a metaphor hook would work best for a narrative essay.

⚡ ‍ Take action: Go through your list of potential hooks and cross out anything that doesn't fit the type of essay you're writing, whether it's persuasive , argumentative, or any other type.

3. Audience and tone

A best practice I often share with writers is to think of one reader and keep yourself in their shoes . This exercise can tell you so much about your audience — what kind of tone they like, what matters the most to them, what topics interest them, and so on. 

You can use these insights to create a compelling essay hook. Here’s how:

• For an argumentative essay, you’re trying to convince someone who doesn’t agree with you that what you’re claiming is right or, at least, reasonable. You don’t want to turn them off with snarky or offensive language — but you do want to be authoritative. Your hook should match that tone and support your effort.
• A narrative essay is likely to welcome more lyrical language, so starting with a colorful description or an anecdote might make more sense than, say, a bold claim or surprising fact. Whatever tone you choose for your narrative essay — comical or gentle or bold — should be used for your hook.
• ‍ Expository essays can use all sorts of tones and be written to a variety of audiences, so think carefully about the tone that best fits your subject matter. An essay explaining how the human body shuts down when overdosed will likely require a different tone than one on the lives of circus masters in the late 1800s. 

⚡ ‍ Take action: Look at your list. Can you write these potential hooks in a tone that suits your subject and audience?

4. Length of essay

Are you writing a 10-page paper or a three-page reflection? Or is this your senior thesis, pushing over 100 pages?

‍ If you’re writing a shorter paper, you’ll want to keep your hook quick and snappy.  

Readers are expecting a quick read, and they don’t want to spend five minutes only going through the introduction. 

In contrast, you can approach a longer essay — like a senior thesis or a term paper — with a longer hook. Just make sure your hook relates to and supports the core point of your essay. You don’t want to waste space describing a scene that ultimately has nothing to do with the rest of your piece.

⚡ ‍ Take action: If you write out the items on your list, how long will they be? A sentence or paragraph? Perfect. Two to five paragraphs? Unless your essay is on the longer side, you may want to save that information for later in the piece.

‍ Now that you know the basic facts about what you’re writing, let’s look at some approaches you could use to catch those readers — and reel them in.

3 Approaches to Avoid When Writing Hooks 

I’ve read hundreds of essays — enough to recognize lazy writing from the first few words. It’s equally easy for readers to discard your essays as ‘poorly written’ just by reading the first line. 

So, I made a list of three types of essay hooks you want to avoid at all costs because these hooks can only disappoint your readers. 

1. Quotations

Quotes are probably the most overused type of hook in any form of writing. What's even worse is rinsing and repeating the same old quotes from Abraham Lincoln or Nelson Mandela in your essays. 

No matter how powerful a quote sounds, you shouldn’t slap it at the opening of your essay. It doesn’t give readers the excitement of reading something original and looks lazy.

For example, if you’re writing an essay on productivity, here’s what a good and bad lede looks like:

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work” – Stephen King

Did you know that consuming 100 gms of sugar can slash your productivity levels by over 50% in a day?  

2. Definitions

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines a hook as "a thing designed to catch people's attention." 

If I opened my article with this dictionary definition of a hook, you’d have either dozed off or left this page long back to find something more interesting. 

Here's the thing: definitions put people to sleep. Readers don't want to see a formal, jargon-heavy definition of a topic as the very first line of an essay. Your opening statement should have some personality in it to show readers they're in for an exciting read. 

For example, if you’re writing about happy hormones, here’s what a good and bad lede looks like:

Happy hormones are known to boost the happiness levels in your body by creating positive feelings.

Ever wondered why cat videos make you instantly happy, and ice creams give you an extra dose of energy? It's all about how happy hormones control our brain chemistry.

3. “Imagine this”

Opening your essay with "Imagine this" used to be an interesting way to put your readers in a scenario and set the context for your essay. But now, it's far too cliched and just another lazy attempt to write an essay hook. 

You can create a relatable scenario for users without asking them to imagine or picture it. Use the descriptive hook format with an interesting choice of words to convey the same ideas more creatively.

For example, if you’re writing an essay on preparing for higher studies abroad, here’s what a good and bad lede looks like:

Imagine this: You’ve been applying to multiple universities, writing SOPs, and preparing for exams without guidance. Everything can go south any minute. 

College application season is officially here. But with each passing day, you’re under more and more stress to apply to your chosen colleges and tick all the items off your list.

‍Our Go-To Trick for Writing Catchy Hooks

This opening statement can make or break your entire essay. While I’ve broken down my best tips to create the best essay hooks, here’s a surefire way to write compelling openings :

Go through your notes and either outline your essay or write the whole thing. This way, you’ll know the central thread (or throughline) that runs throughout your piece. 

Once your essay or outline is complete, go back through and identify a particularly compelling fact, claim, or example that relates to that central thread.

‍Write up that fact, claim, or example as the hook for your essay using any of the methods we’ve covered. Then revise or write your essay so the hook leads smoothly into the rest of the piece and you don’t repeat that information elsewhere.

Does your hook spark curiosity in you? 

Did that fact surprise you in the research stage? 

Chances are, your readers will have the same reaction.

And that’s exactly what you want.

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How to Write a Hook: Start Off Your Essay Strong with This Guide

What is a Hook for an Essay: Importance and Purpose

Which section of your essay can make your readers dip their toes into your writing? Is it the body paragraphs where all the analysis is laid out? Or maybe the introduction, where you present your thesis statement and voice your perspective on the subject? Well, if you think it is the latter, then we must agree with your decision. However, let's get more specific; if we take the introductory paragraph to pieces, which piece gets the most recognition? You must have guessed from the article's title that we're talking about a hook. But first, let's define what is a hook for an essay before we walk you through the reasons why it deserves our pat on the back.

The hook is the initial sentence in a written work. Whether you're asking how to write a hook for a song, blog post, or term paper, know that the purpose of any effective hook is to seize the reader's attention. It can be one sentence long, often for shorter pieces, or composed of several lines - usually for larger pieces. Making the reader want to keep reading is what an essay hook accomplishes for your paper, just as an intriguing introduction does for any piece.

Our main emphasis in this guide is on creating a good hook for an essay. Nonetheless, these fundamental guidelines apply to nearly every format for communicating with your audience. Whether writing a personal statement, a speech, or a presentation, making a solid first impression is crucial to spur your readers into action.

How to Write a Hook for Different Kinds of Writing

Although it is a tough skill to master, understanding how to write a hook is crucial for academic writing success. By reviewing the most prevalent kinds of essay hooks, you can discover how to effectively captivate readers from the start and generate a hook that is ideal for your article. To do so, let's head over to the following sections prepared by our dissertation writers .

How to Write a Hook for a College Essay?

By mastering how to write a hook for a college essay, you have the opportunity to stand out from the hundreds of applicants with identical academic portfolios to yours in your college essay. It should shed light on who you are, represent your true nature, and show your individuality. But first, you need an attention-grabbing start if you want the admissions committee to read more of yours than theirs. For this, you'll require a strong hook.

Set the Scene

When wondering how to write a good hook for an essay, consider setting the scene. Open in the middle of a key moment, plunge in with vivid details and conversation to keep your essay flowing and attract the reader. Make the reader feel like they are seeing a moment from your life and have just tuned in.

Open with an Example

Starting with a specific example is also a great idea if you're explaining how you acquired a particular skill or unique accomplishment. Then, similar to how you established the scenario above, you may return to this point later and discuss its significance throughout the remaining sections.

Open with an Anecdote

Using an anecdotal hook doesn't necessarily mean that your essay should also be humorous. The joke should be short and well-aimed to achieve the best results. To assist the reader in visualizing the situation and understanding what you are up against when tackling a task or overcoming a challenge, you might also use a funny irony. And if this sounds too overwhelming to compose, buy an essay on our platform and let our expert writers convey your unmatched story!

How to Write a Hook for an Argumentative Essay?

If you write a strong hook, your instructor will be compelled to read your argument in the following paragraphs. So, put your creative thinking cap on while crafting the hook, and write in a way that entices readers to continue reading the essay.

Use Statistics

Statistics serve as a useful hook because they encourage research. When used in argumentative writing, statistics can introduce readers to previously undiscovered details and data. That can greatly increase their desire to read your article from start to finish. You can also consider this advice when unsure how to write a good hook for a research paper. Especially if you're conducting a quantitative study, a statistic hook can be a solid start.

Use a Common Misconception

Another answer to your 'how to write a hook for an argumentative essay' question is to use a common misconception. What could be a better way to construct an interesting hook, which should grab readers' attention, than to incorporate a widely held misconception? A widespread false belief is one that many people hold to be true. When you create a hook with a misinterpretation, you startle your readers and immediately capture their interest.

How to Write a Hook for a Persuasive Essay?

The finest hooks for a persuasive essay capture the reader's interest while leading them to almost unconsciously support your position even before they are aware of it. You can accomplish this by employing the following hook ideas for an essay:

Ask a Rhetorical Question

By posing a query at the outset of your essay, you may engage the reader's critical thinking and whet their appetite for the solution you won't provide until later. Try to formulate a question wide enough for them to not immediately know the answer and detailed enough to avoid becoming a generic hook.

Use an Emotional Appeal

This is a fantastic approach to arouse sympathy and draw the reader into your cause. By appealing to the reader's emotions, you may establish a bond that encourages them to read more and get invested in the subject you cover.

Using these strategies, you won't have to wonder how to write a hook for a persuasive essay anymore!

How to Write a Hook for a Literary Analysis Essay?

Finding strong essay openers might be particularly challenging when writing a literary analysis. Coming up with something very remarkable on your own while writing about someone else's work is no easy feat. But we have some expert solutions below:

Use Literary Quotes

Using a literary quote sounds like the best option when unsure how to write a hook for a literary analysis essay. Nonetheless, its use is not restricted to that and is mostly determined by the style and meaning of the quotes. Still, when employing literary quotes, it's crucial to show two things at once: first, how well you understand the textual information. And second, you know how to capture the reader's interest right away.

Employ Quotes from Famous People

This is another style of hook that is frequently employed in literary analysis. But if you wonder how to write a good essay hook without sounding boring, choose a historical person with notable accomplishments and keep your readers intrigued and inspired to read more.

How to Write a Hook for an Informative Essay?

In an informative essay, your ultimate goal is to not only educate your audience but also engage and keep them interested from the very beginning. For this, consider the following:

Start with a Fact or Definition

You might begin your essay with an interesting fact or by giving a definition related to your subject. The same standard applies here for most types mentioned above: it must be intriguing, surprising, and/or alarming.

Ask Questions that Relate to Your Topic

Another solution to 'How to write a hook for an informative essay?' is to introduce your essay with a relevant question. This hook lets you pique a reader's interest in your essay and urge them to keep reading as they ponder the answer.

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Expert-Approved Tips for Writing an Essay Hook

Are you still struggling with the ideal opening sentence for your essay? Check out some advice from our essay helper on how to write a hook sentence and make your opening stand out.

• Keep your essay type in mind . Remember to keep your hook relevant. An effective hook for an argumentative or descriptive essay format will differ greatly. Therefore, the relevancy of the hook might be even more important than the content it conveys.
• Decide on the purpose of your hook . When unsure how to write a hook for an essay, try asking the following questions: What result are you hoping to get from it? Would you like your readers to be curious? Or, even better, surprised? Perhaps even somewhat caught off guard? Determine the effect you wish to accomplish before selecting a hook.
• Choose a hook at the end of the writing process. Even though it should be the first sentence of your paper, it doesn't mean you should write your hook first. Writing an essay is a long and creative process. So, if you can't think of an effective hook at the beginning, just keep writing according to your plan, and it will eventually come into your head. If you were lucky enough to concoct your hook immediately, double-check your writing to see if it still fits into the whole text and its style once you've finished writing.
• Make it short . The shorter, the better – this rule works for essay hooks. Keeping your hook to a minimum size will ensure that readers will read it at the same moment they start looking at your essay. Even before thinking if they want or don't want to read it, their attention will be captured, and their curiosity will get the best of them. So, they will continue reading the entire text to discover as much as possible.

Now you know how to write a good hook and understand that a solid hook is the difference between someone delving further into your work or abandoning it immediately. With our hook examples for an essay, you can do more than just write a great paper. We do not doubt that you can even write a winning term paper example right away!

Try to become an even better writer with the help of our paper writing service . Give them the freedom to write superior hooks and full essays for you so you may learn from them!

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What Is A Good Hook For An Essay?

How to write a hook for an essay, what is a good hook for an argumentative essay.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

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Write an Attention-Grabbing Opening Sentence for an Essay

• M.Ed., Education Administration, University of Georgia
• B.A., History, Armstrong State University

You can think of the first sentence of your essay as you would a fishing hook. It grabs your reader and allows you reel the person into your essay and your train of thought. The hook for your essay can be an interesting sentence that captures a person's attention, it can be thought-provoking, or even, entertaining.

The hook for your essay often appears in the first sentence . The opening paragraph includes a thesis sentence . Some popular hook choices can include using an interesting quote, a little-known fact, famous last words, or a statistic .

A quote hook is best used when you are composing an essay based on an author, story, or book. It helps establish your authority on the topic and by using someone else's quote, you can strengthen your thesis if the quote supports it.

The following is an example of a quote hook: "A man's errors are his portals of discovery." In the next sentence or two, give a reason for this quote or current example. As for the last sentence (the thesis) : Students grow more confident and self-sufficient when parents allow them to make mistakes and experience failure.

General statement

By setting the tone in the opening sentence with a uniquely written general statement of your thesis, the beauty is that you get right to the point. Most readers appreciate that approach.

For example, you can start with the following statement: Many studies show that the biological sleep pattern for teens shifts a few hours, which means teens naturally stay up later and feel alert later in the morning. The next sentence, set up the body of your essay, perhaps by introducing the concept that school days should be adjusted so that they are more in sync with the teenager's natural sleep or wake cycle. As for the last sentence (the thesis) :  If every school day started at ten o'clock, many students would find it easier to stay focused.

By listing a proven fact or entertaining an interesting statistic that might even sound implausible to the reader, you can excite a reader to want to know more. 

Like this hook: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics , teens and young adults experience the highest rates of violent crime. Your next sentence can set up the argument that it's dangerous for teenagers to be on the streets at late hours. A fitting thesis statement might read: Parents are justified in implementing a strict curfew, regardless of a student's academic performance.

The Right Hook for Your Essay

The good news about finding a hook? You can find a quote, fact, or another type of hook after you determine your thesis. You can accomplish this with a simple online search about your topic after you've developed your essay .

You can nearly have the essay finished before you revisit the opening paragraph. Many writers polish up the first paragraph after the essay is completed.

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Writing a personal essay from the start, overcoming challenges in analytical essay writing, how should i format my college essay properly, how to write a hook.

When writing a good essay, you want to capture the reader’s attention from the very first sentence to keep them focused throughout the following text. The ‘hook’ of an essay is that opening sentence – the first impression that sets the tone for the rest of your writing. It’s the bait you use to catch your readers, urging them to continue going deeper into the text. And since it is kind of an art form, you need a certain knowledge to craft perfect hooks. In the guide below we will give all the necessary details on how to make a good hook, so you better don’t skip on reading this article the whole way through.

Hooks for Essays: What Are Those?

An essay hook is essentially the first one or two sentences of your essay. Sometimes though (if it is relevant to your writing) it can even take the space of the whole first paragraph. Its main purpose is to intrigue your audience and pique their interest, compelling them to continue reading.  If you are wondering why you need a well-crafted hook here are just a few reasons off the top of our heads:

• To draw in the readers 
• To seamlessly connect to the broader theme or argument of your essay. Depending on the type of essay you are writing, your hook can be in the form of a question, a surprising statistic or fact, an anecdote, a quote, or even a vivid description.
• To set the tone for the rest of your writing

See, you don’t write your text just for yourself – you are doing it for your audience, whoever that might be. That’s why you need to make your reader want to stick out till the end of the text, and do that from the very beginning.

Top Hook Sentence Starters: Types and Examples

If you ask different writers, some of them might say that a rhetorical question makes a good hook, or that adding a quote is a much better way to start your writing. The thing is, all of these statements are true. There are several ways to create good hooks for argumentative essays. Choosing the one for you will depend on the audience, your writing style, and the topic of your text.

You may have seen that a lot of texts (not just essays, for that matter) start with some kind of quote, either from a book, article, a famous person, or even the writer’s relative or friend.  The reason behind this is that it is rather a simple way to intrigue the reader from the very beginning.

Quotes are compact and mostly widely recognizable, and they present the main idea of your text right away. To find a fitting quote, you can explore classic literature, speeches by influential figures, research articles, or even poetry. The key is to select a quote that aligns with the essay’s subject and contributes meaningfully to the argument or narrative being constructed. 

❓Rhetorical Question

A rhetorical question is a query that’s posed for its persuasive effect rather than a direct answer. By asking a question, you directly engage the reader, prompting them to consider their own stance or feelings regarding the topic at hand, thus creating a deeper personal connection between them and the text they read.

Essays that stand to benefit most from a rhetorical question as a hook are those that aim to explore moral dilemmas, provoke critical thinking, or challenge conventional beliefs. This type of hook is ideally suited for audiences who enjoy intellectual engagement and are prepared to contemplate complex issues. A well-built rhetorical question should be open-ended, avoiding simple yes or no answers, and should ideally lead seamlessly into the argument or thesis of your essay.

📊Statistic/Fact

Integrating a fact or statistic into your essay’s opening can instantly ground your reader in the reality of your topic. It offers them a tangible piece of evidence that vividly shows the importance of the issue you present. This type of hook is particularly effective in persuasive or argumentative essays where empirical evidence can support your stance right away. A compelling fact or statistic surprises (or shocks) the reader as well as provides a solid foundation for the arguments that follow. This makes it easier for your audience to appreciate the significance of your essay.

Anecdotes are brief, engaging stories showcasing a slice of life. This can help reveal the essay’s theme, making the topic relatable and memorable to the audience. An anecdote hook works exceptionally well in narrative and college application essays, or pieces designed to evoke an emotional response or deeper understanding of a universal human experience.

To make your anecdote work as a hook, you can use the STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) method. Using this approach, you structure your story by first setting the scene (Situation), then describing the purpose (Task), detailing what was done (Action), and, finally, revealing the outcome (Result).

🧐Common misconception

Starting with a common misconception is a dynamic way of engaging with the audience. With such a hook you can challenge their beliefs and assumptions. Using a widely held but incorrect belief, you immediately create a narrative tension that compels the reader to continue, eager to uncover the truth. This method is particularly effective in essays that aim to debunk myths, promote critical thinking, or introduce lesser-known facts about popular topics.

✍️Description

Descriptions are mostly used to transport the audience into the discussed scene or subject matter This technique involves painting a detailed picture with words and using sensory descriptions to evoke the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures relevant to your essay’s topic. Description hooks are particularly effective in narrative essays, descriptive pieces, travel writing, and essays aiming to evoke a strong sense of place or atmosphere.

Jokes tend to lighten the mood especially if the topic lends itself to a humorous approach. Therefore, using it as your opening statement can spark joy or amusement in your readers, making them want to stay for a heartwarming story. This type of hook is mostly used to set a friendly and approachable tone for the piece. Note though, that your joke needs to balance humor with the serious intentions of the essay, providing an inviting entry point without undermining the piece’s overall message or purpose.

Key Steps & Tips on How to Write a Hook

Now, you know what a hook is and what types of opening sentences there can be. Overall, this knowledge is enough for you to understand how to start your essay in an attention-grabbing manner. However, we have a few notes on how you can build your writing process specifically to create a compelling hook:

• Understand Your Audience : Tailor your hook to the interests and expectations of your readers. Consider the style and level of formality that will work for your audience.
• Define the Tone of Your Essay : The overall tone of your essay is important, and the first sentence or two should also be written in the same style. Whether it’s serious, humorous, or somewhere in between, stick to the initial way of writing.
• Make it Relevant : Your first sentence needs to be relevant to your essay’s main theme or argument. After all, you don’t want to confuse your reader.
• Keep it Concise : As a hook is just an opening statement, it should be brief and impactful, setting the stage without overwhelming the audience.
• Experiment : Don’t be afraid to try different types of hooks to see what works best for your essay. After all, all texts are different.

We have also a few extra tips on how to make your first couple of sentences more authentic and gripping. For example, you can use sensory details to add depth and imagery to your words. It especially works for description hooks. Be careful with cliches and popular phrases though. Besides, don’t give away too much information in your hook – leave your readers wanting more.  Have fun with it, play around with words, and maybe add puns. Writing a hook can be a creative and exciting process, so embrace it.

What Makes The Good Hooks for Essays

What fundamentally distinguishes a compelling hook from a bland one is its ability to instantly grasp the reader’s attention and seamlessly connect them to the core theme of the writing. In essence, a good hook is the one that is a) relevant and b) intriguing. And what should influence your choice of the right hook is the initial intent of the writing. Understand the purpose behind your work— to inform, persuade, entertain, or provoke thought— and you will certainly make the right choice for your first few sentences.

Sometimes though, even the most creative of writers can’t come up with a great starter on the spot. If this is your case, don’t fixate on the situation. Continue writing your essay and after it’s done come back to the introduction. This way you will already have an idea of how your essay looks like and the key points it discusses, so it will be much easier for you to pick an opening line for your writing. 

It is also a good idea to reflect on the emotions or reactions you want to evoke in your readers. This will help you choose a quote or an anecdote that will adequately convey those exact feelings. And don’t tie yourself to the conventional ways of building hooks. You can always try and come up with something unique, that will fit best for your essay specifically. Experimentation, paired with a deep understanding of your intended audience and the core message of your piece, often leads to discovering that perfect starting point for your writing.

Creating a perfect hook is all about building an immediate, meaningful connection with your audience. The key lies in understanding who your readers are and what resonates with them, then carefully selecting and writing down an opening that aligns with the overall tone and theme of your essay. It doesn’t really matter whether you use a poignant quote, a compelling question, or an intriguing statistic. The right hook can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, turning passive readers into active participants in the narrative you’re building.

What is a good hook sentence?

A good hook sentence grabs the reader’s attention, making them eager to continue reading. It can be a question, a quote, a startling fact, or any statement that provokes curiosity or emotion. 

How do you write an effective hook?

To be able to write an effective hook, you need to know your audience, choose a hook that matches the tone of your essay, make it relevant to your topic, and make it concise and impactful. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different types of essay starters until you find the one that works best for your text. 

What is a catchy hook for an essay?

A catchy hook is one that is memorable and engaging, often through humor, a shocking fact, or a thought-provoking question. So, be creative and think outside the box when crafting the first sentences of your essay. They will set the tone for your further writing. 

How do you grab readers attention in an introduction?

The main trick to grabbing readers’ attention in an introduction is using a relevant hook sentence, that will be intriguing, and tailored to the audience’s interests or emotions. It should also connect to the main theme or argument of your essay.  So, make sure you put effort into building a strong and effective starter for your essay. Because those first few sentences will determine whether your writing will be set out for success or not.

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Apr 5, 2023

How to Write an Essay Hook | Tips, Tricks, and Examples

What does fishing and essay writing have in common? It's all about the hook! Just like a fisherman needs a good hook to catch a fish, you need an excellent essay hook to reel in your readers. If you're tired of your essays flopping like a fish out of water, don't worry - in this article, we'll teach you how to craft a hook that will have your readers hooked from the very first sentence. Get ready to bait your audience and catch their attention like a pro!

Welcome to the world of essay writing! Crafting an essay that captivates your audience from the very beginning can be challenging. As a student, you might have struggled with the question, "How do I write an essay hook?" The answer is simple: you need to grab the reader's attention and keep them engaged from the first sentence. But how do you do that effectively?

Don't worry; that's where Jenni.ai comes in! Our AI tool is designed to help students write essays that stand out, with powerful hook examples for essays that will make your paper impossible to put down.

That's why we've created this blog post to help you understand what a hook is, and how to write one and provide you with some hook essay examples that will inspire you to take your writing to the next level. Whether you're writing a persuasive essay, a narrative essay, or a research paper, we've got you covered!

But first, let's talk about what an essay hook is. A hook is an initial statement in an essay, typically the first sentence or a group of sentences that grab the reader's attention and make them want to read more. It's the first impression you give to your reader, and it can make or break your essay.

A good hook should be intriguing, thought-provoking, and relevant to your topic. It can be a question, a quote, a statistic, a personal anecdote, or anything else that piques your reader's interest.

How to Write a Hook

Now that you know what a hook is and why it's important, let's dive into how to write a hook that will grab your reader's attention.

Start with an Interesting Fact or Statistic

One of the most effective ways to start an essay is with an interesting fact or statistic that relates to your topic. This will immediately grab your reader's attention and make them curious to learn more.

For example, if you're writing an essay about the impact of climate change on the ocean, you could start with a startling statistic like "The ocean has absorbed 90% of the heat produced by global warming, causing it to become 30% more acidic in the last century alone."

Use a Metaphor or Simile

Metaphors and similes can be powerful tools for creating an engaging hook. By comparing something familiar to your reader with something unfamiliar or unexpected, you can pique their interest and create a sense of intrigue.

For instance, if you're writing an essay about the importance of education, you could start with a metaphor like "Education is the key that unlocks the door to a brighter future."

Pose a Question

Asking a thought-provoking question can be an effective way to hook your reader and encourage them to think about your topic in a new way. The key is to ask a question that is relevant to your topic and that will make your reader curious to find out the answer.

For example, if you're writing an essay about the benefits of meditation, you could start with a question like "What if just 10 minutes of meditation a day could reduce your stress levels and improve your mental clarity?"

Share a Personal Anecdote

Sharing a personal story or anecdote can be a powerful way to connect with your reader and make your essay feel more relatable. It also shows that you have a personal stake in the topic you're writing about.

For instance, if you're writing an essay about the importance of mental health, you could start with a personal anecdote like "I remember the moment I realized I needed to prioritize my mental health. It was a sunny day, but I felt like I was drowning in darkness."

By using one of these techniques, you can create an essay hook that is engaging, relevant, and memorable. So the next time you sit down to write an essay, remember to start with a hook that will reel in your reader and keep them hooked until the very end.

Example Essays with Engaging Hooks

The End of Innocence: How Technology Is Changing Childhood

Introduction:

From playing in the backyard to scrolling through screens, the childhood experience has drastically changed in the last few decades. Technology has become an integral part of our lives, and children are not left behind. With the emergence of smartphones, tablets, and other smart devices, the digital age has paved the way for a new kind of childhood experience.

However, this change has raised some serious concerns about the impact of technology on children's lives. In this article, we will explore the end of innocence and how technology is changing childhood.

Digital Age and Childhood:

With the advent of technology, childhood has evolved. Smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other smart devices have changed the way children play, learn, and communicate. The digital age has brought a wealth of information and entertainment that was not available in the past.

Children can now access an extensive range of educational resources, connect with peers, and entertain themselves at the touch of a button. However, this has led to concerns about the impact of technology on children's physical, social, and emotional development.

Physical Development:

Technology has made it easier for children to engage in sedentary activities such as watching videos, playing games, and browsing the internet. This has led to concerns about the impact of technology on physical development.

According to the World Health Organization, physical inactivity is one of the leading risk factors for global mortality. With children spending more time in screens, there is a real risk of obesity and other health problems. Furthermore, the excessive use of screens can lead to eye strain, headaches, and other health issues.

Social Development:

Technology has changed the way children interact with each other. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have given children a new way to connect with peers. However, social media can also be a source of cyberbullying, online harassment, and other negative experiences. 

Furthermore, the excessive use of screens can lead to social isolation, as children spend less time engaging in face-to-face interactions.

Emotional Development:

The impact of technology on children's emotional development is a subject of debate. While some studies have found a positive relationship between technology use and emotional development, others have found the opposite.

The excessive use of screens can lead to addiction, anxiety, and depression. Furthermore, children who spend more time on screens are less likely to develop empathy and emotional intelligence.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the digital age has changed childhood, and the end of innocence is a real concern. Technology has brought a wealth of benefits, but it has also led to concerns about the impact on children's physical, social, and emotional development. As parents, it is important to strike a balance between technology use and other activities.

Encouraging children to engage in physical activity, spend time with friends and family, and pursue hobbies can help to mitigate the negative effects of technology. By being mindful of the impact of technology on childhood, we can help our children to grow into healthy, well-rounded individuals.

The Price of Perfection: Why Society's Standards Are Hurting Us

Perfection is a goal that many people strive for in their lives. Society often places a great deal of emphasis on achieving perfection, whether it is in our appearance, career, or personal life. However, the pursuit of perfection can have a negative impact on our mental and emotional well-being. In this article, we will explore the price of perfection and why society's standards are hurting us.

The Perfectionism Trap:

Perfectionism is the belief that one must be flawless in all aspects of life. It is a personality trait that can lead to a range of negative outcomes, including anxiety, depression, and stress. Society often reinforces the notion that perfectionism is desirable, which can lead people to feel inadequate or inferior when they fall short of this ideal.

The Cost of Perfection:

The pursuit of perfection can have significant costs, both personally and socially. At an individual level, it can lead to burnout, anxiety, and depression. Perfectionism is often associated with high levels of stress, as individuals feel pressure to meet unrealistic expectations. This can lead to physical health problems, such as headaches, muscle tension, and insomnia.

At a societal level, the pressure to be perfect can lead to social isolation, as individuals feel unable to meet the expectations of their peers. Social media has exacerbated this problem, as individuals compare themselves to others who seem to have achieved perfection in various aspects of their lives.

This can lead to a sense of inadequacy and low self-esteem, as individuals feel they cannot measure up to the standards set by others.

Breaking Free from Perfectionism:

Breaking free from the trap of perfectionism requires a shift in mindset. It requires recognizing that perfection is not achievable and that mistakes and failures are a natural part of the human experience. Learning to embrace imperfection can lead to greater emotional resilience and mental well-being.

It also requires challenging the societal norms that reinforce the importance of perfectionism. This includes questioning the unrealistic expectations placed on individuals in various aspects of life, such as their appearance or career success.

In conclusion, the pursuit of perfection can come at a significant cost to our mental and emotional well-being. Society often reinforces the notion that perfectionism is desirable, which can lead individuals to feel inadequate or inferior when they fall short of this ideal.

Breaking free from the trap of perfectionism requires a shift in mindset and a willingness to embrace imperfection. By recognizing that perfection is not achievable, we can work towards greater emotional resilience and mental well-being. It also requires challenging the societal norms that reinforce the importance of perfectionism, so that we can create a more compassionate and accepting society for all.

Breaking the Stigma: Why Mental Health Matters

Mental health is a crucial aspect of our overall well-being, yet it is often stigmatized and overlooked in our society. Many people suffer from mental health issues, but due to the stigma surrounding these conditions, they may not seek the help they need. In this article, we will explore the importance of mental health and why breaking the stigma is so crucial.

The Impact of Mental Health on Our Lives:

Mental health plays a crucial role in our overall well-being. It affects our emotions, thoughts, and behaviour, and impacts how we interact with others and the world around us. Mental health issues can have a significant impact on our daily lives, leading to difficulties with work, relationships, and overall functioning.

The Stigma Surrounding Mental Health:

Despite the prevalence of mental health issues, there is still a significant stigma surrounding these conditions. This can lead people to feel ashamed or embarrassed about seeking help, which can delay treatment and lead to more severe symptoms. Stigma can also lead to discrimination and negative attitudes towards individuals with mental health issues, which can further exacerbate their symptoms and impact their quality of life.

Breaking the Stigma:

Breaking the stigma surrounding mental health is crucial to ensuring that individuals receive the help they need. It requires challenging the negative attitudes and misconceptions that contribute to the stigma. This includes promoting awareness and education about mental health issues, as well as encouraging open and honest conversations about mental health.

By creating a more accepting and supportive environment for individuals with mental health issues, we can help to reduce the stigma and improve access to care.

The Importance of Seeking Help:

Seeking help for mental health issues is crucial for both individuals and society as a whole. By addressing mental health issues early on, we can prevent more severe symptoms and improve overall functioning. It also helps to reduce the stigma surrounding mental health, as individuals who seek help can serve as role models and advocates for others who may be struggling.

Mental health is a crucial aspect of our overall well-being, yet it is often stigmatized and overlooked in our society. Breaking the stigma surrounding mental health is crucial to ensuring that individuals receive the help they need. It requires challenging negative attitudes and misconceptions about mental health, promoting awareness and education, and encouraging open and honest conversations.

By doing so, we can create a more accepting and supportive environment for individuals with mental health issues, and improve access to care for all.

From Zero to Hero: The Power of Resilience

Resilience is the ability to overcome adversity and bounce back from challenges. It is a powerful trait that can help individuals achieve success in all areas of their lives, from personal relationships to professional pursuits. 

Life can be full of challenges and setbacks that can leave us feeling defeated and discouraged. But what sets successful people apart from those who struggle is their ability to bounce back from adversity and keep pushing forward. This ability to overcome obstacles and persevere in the face of adversity is known as resilience, and it can be a powerful tool for achieving success in all areas of life.

In this article, we will explore the concept of resilience, its benefits, and strategies for building it. We'll also look at real-life examples of resilience in action and how it can help us go from zero to hero in our own lives.

Defining resilience: What it is and why it matters

Resilience is the ability to adapt and thrive in the face of adversity, trauma, or stress. It involves being able to bounce back from setbacks and continue moving forward despite challenges. Resilience is not a fixed trait; rather, it can be developed and strengthened over time through deliberate practice and the cultivation of a growth mindset.

Resilience matters because life is full of challenges, both big and small. Whether it's a difficult job interview, a breakup, or a health issue, we all face obstacles that can derail us if we don't have the tools to cope. Resilience helps us stay strong in the face of adversity, maintain our focus on our goals, and continue making progress even when the going gets tough.

The benefits of resilience: How it can improve your life

There are many benefits to developing resilience. Here are just a few:

Increased self-confidence: When we develop resilience, we become more confident in our ability to handle challenges and overcome obstacles. This increased confidence can spill over into other areas of our lives, helping us take risks and pursue our goals with greater vigour.

Improved mental health: Resilience has been linked to improved mental health outcomes, including lower rates of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is because resilient individuals are better able to cope with stress and trauma, and are less likely to be overwhelmed by negative emotions.

Greater success in personal and professional pursuits: Resilience is a key predictor of success in both personal and professional endeavours. Individuals who are more resilient are better able to persevere in the face of challenges, bounce back from setbacks, and stay focused on their goals.

Strategies for building resilience: From mindfulness to self-care

While some individuals may be naturally more resilient than others, resilience is a trait that can be developed and strengthened over time. Here are some strategies for building resilience:

Practice mindfulness:

Mindfulness can help us develop a greater awareness of our thoughts and emotions, and learn to regulate them more effectively. This can be especially helpful when we are facing challenges or setbacks.

Cultivate a growth mindset: 

A growth mindset involves believing that our abilities can be developed through hard work and dedication. This mindset can help us stay motivated and focused even when we encounter obstacles.

Practice self-care: 

Taking care of ourselves physically, emotionally, and mentally is essential for building resilience. This may include getting enough sleep, eating well, exercising regularly, and engaging in activities that bring us joy and fulfilment.

Real-life examples of resilience in action

There are countless examples of individuals who have demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of adversity. For example:

Oprah Winfrey grew up in poverty and was a victim of abuse, but she persevered and went on to become one of the most successful and influential people in the world.

J.K. Rowling was a struggling single mother when she wrote the first Harry Potter book, which was rejected by multiple publishers. But she kept writing and eventually found success, becoming one of the bestselling authors of all time

Another factor that contributes to resilience is having a positive outlook. People who are resilient tend to focus on the positive aspects of a situation, rather than dwelling on the negative. They also have a sense of optimism and hopefulness, which allows them to see the light at the end of the tunnel even in the darkest of times. 

In fact, studies have shown that having a positive attitude can help individuals cope better with stress and adversity, leading to increased resilience.

In addition to having a positive outlook, building strong relationships with others can also help to foster resilience. Having a support system of family, friends, and even colleagues can provide a sense of belonging and connection, which can be critical during difficult times. This support system can also provide emotional and practical support, helping individuals to better manage and overcome challenges.

Furthermore, resilience can also be strengthened through learning and personal growth. By taking the time to reflect on past experiences, individuals can gain valuable insights into their own strengths and weaknesses. This self-awareness can help them to develop a greater sense of resilience, as they become better equipped to deal with future challenges.

Finally, taking care of one's physical health can also contribute to resilience. Engaging in regular exercise, getting enough sleep, and eating a healthy diet are all important factors in maintaining physical well-being. By prioritizing physical health, individuals can better cope with stress and adversity, allowing them to bounce back more easily when faced with difficult situations.

In conclusion, resilience is a powerful trait that can help individuals overcome adversity and achieve success in all areas of life. Whether it is through developing a positive outlook, building strong relationships, or prioritizing physical health, there are many strategies that can be used to build resilience. 

By focusing on these strategies and working to develop a greater sense of resilience, individuals can learn to transform themselves from zero to hero, achieving their goals and living their best lives.

In conclusion, the essay hook is a crucial element in any essay, as it is the first thing that readers will see and can make or break their interest in the rest of the essay. There are many different types of essay hooks that can be used, from rhetorical questions and anecdotes to statistics and quotes.

By understanding the different types of hooks and how they can be used effectively, writers can capture their readers' attention and keep them engaged throughout the essay.

To create a successful essay hook, it is important to consider the audience, the topic, and the purpose of the essay. By tailoring the hook to these factors, writers can create a hook that is not only attention-grabbing but also relevant and meaningful.

Fortunately, with the help of Jenni.ai , creating an essay hook has never been easier. Our AI-powered writing assistant can help you create essay hooks with its AI autocomplete feature, Jenni.ai can help you create essay hooks that will capture your readers' attention.

So, if you're struggling with your essay hook or looking for a way to streamline your writing process, sign up for Jenni.ai today. Our powerful writing assistant can help you take your writing to the next level, and with a free trial available, there's no reason not to give Jenni.ai a try.

Sign up today and start writing essays that will hook your readers and earn you the grades you deserve!

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How to Write a Hook: Top 5 Tips for Writers

Hannah Yang

How do you make people feel excited to read your work?

Well, for starters, you can write a great hook.

The “hook” refers to the first sentence, or first few sentences, of an essay, article, or story. That’s because these first few lines need to hook readers in, the same way fishermen use bait to hook fish in.

If you’re trying to figure out how to write a hook, you’ve come to the right place. Read on to learn how to write a fantastic hook and to see some examples of successful ones.

What Is a Hook in Writing?

Top 5 tips for writing good hooks, great examples of hooks, is writing a hook in an essay different from a story hook, conclusion on how to write a hook.

We use the term “hook” to talk about the very beginning of a written work—specifically the part designed to grab readers’ attention. The hook can be as short as a single sentence or as long as a full paragraph.

Writing hooks is a necessary skill for all types of writing—narrative essays, research papers, fiction writing, and more.

What Makes a Good Hook Important?

Good hooks make your reader feel excited to keep reading.

If you’re writing a book, you need a great hook so people decide to actually buy your work, instead of putting it back on the shelf.

If you’re writing a blog post or article, you need a great hook so people read to the end, instead of scrolling or flipping to a different article instead.

And if you’re writing an essay for school, you need a good hook so you can practice the skill of writing well.

What Are the Different Types of Hooks?

There’s more than one way to write a great hook.

Here are six types of hooks that will grab your reader’s attention.

• Question hook : a question that provokes the reader’s curiosity and makes them keep reading to find out the answer
• Statement hook : a strong declaration related to your topic that makes the reader keep reading to see you defend this statement
• Statistic hook : an interesting fact or statistic that makes you sound knowledgeable, so your reader trusts your expertise
• Quote hook : a memorable quote, often by a famous person, that the reader will find interesting
• Description hook : a vivid description that immerses your reader into a specific scene
• Anecdotal hook : a personal story that relates to your topic and makes the reader feel personally connected to the story

Here are our top tips for writing a strong opening hook.

Tip 1: Surprise the Reader

Readers crave the unexpected. If you start your piece in a surprising way, they’ll be more likely to keep reading.

You can even say something controversial. Readers will want to keep reading to see how you prove your own statement.

Tip 2: Raise a Question

When starting an essay or a story, you should try to create a question that the reader wants answered.

This doesn’t have to be a literal question that ends with a question mark—instead, it can simply be an unusual statement or a weird situation. Make sure it’s something your target audience will find interesting.

Tip 3: Keep Your Promises

If you open your essay with an interesting hook, you need to be mindful of what you’re promising to the reader. If you don’t keep that promise throughout the piece, your reader will feel tricked.

For example, you’d probably be unhappy if you read a story that started with, “The monster was coming for me” and then, later in the first chapter, said, “Then I woke up and realized it was just a nightmare.”

The first sentence is a strong opening hook, but it promises a dramatic scene, which doesn’t get fulfilled, because the hook turns out not to be real.

An equivalent in an essay would be writing a controversial statement and then failing to prove why that statement is true, or asking an interesting question and then failing to answer it later.

Tip 4: Keep It Relevant

Some writers try so hard to choose an interesting hook that they end up using something irrelevant to their essay. Readers will get confused if you open with a random quote or statistic that only tangentially connects to your thesis.

If you’re choosing between a fascinating hook that doesn’t have much to do with your topic, or a decent hook that’s directly related to your thesis statement, you should go with the latter.

Tip 5: Don’t Stop at the Hook

Some writers focus so much on nailing the opening hook that they forget to make the rest of the essay equally strong.

Your reader could still stop reading on the second page, or the third, or the tenth. Make sure you use strong and engaging writing throughout the piece.

One way to learn how to write hooks is to look at examples.

Here are examples of six hooks you could use to start a persuasive essay about artificial intelligence, plus three hooks you could use to start a sci-fi story.

Example 1: Question Hook

• Will artificial intelligence someday become smarter than humans?

Example 2: Statement Hook

• Artificial intelligence could become smarter than humans by 2050.

Example 3: Statistic Hook

• As of 2022, the global AI industry is worth over $130 billion.

Example 4: Quote Hook

• The scientist Stephen Hawking once said, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

Example 5: Description Hook

• The Alexa AI blinks from the kitchen table, emitting a comforting blue light.

Example 6: Anecdotal Hook

• Like many people of my generation, I used an AI for the first time when I was twelve years old.

Example 7: Sci-Fi Story Hooks

• Samuel Gibson had friends. Sure, all his friends were AI robots that his parents had purchased for him, but they still counted as friends.
• My father’s office is full of strange machines, which none of us are allowed to touch.
• The AI revolt began on Christmas morning of the year 2068.

Both essays and stories require good hooks. After all, you’re still competing for your reader’s attention, no matter what kind of work you’re writing.

However, a story hook will look very different from an essay hook.

If you’re writing fiction, you most likely won’t use a statistic, question, or quote to hook your readers in. Instead, your best options will be a statement, a description, or an anecdote—or, or often, a sentence that combines a little bit of all three.

Just like with essays, you should try to raise a question in your reader’s head. This can be a strange character, an unusual setting, or a mysterious fact.

Here are some examples of strong hooks in novels:

“My first memory, when I was three years old, was of trying to kill my sister.”—Jodi Piccoult, My Sister’s Keeper

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”—Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Once upon a time, on the coldest night of midwinter, in the darkest heart of the forest, Death and Fortune came to a crossroads.”—Margaret Owen, Little Thieves

“The women gather in a YMCA basement rec room: hard linoleum floors, half-windows along one wall, view of sidewalk and brick.”—Maria Adelmann, How to Be Eaten

“I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a rainy overcast day in 1975.”—Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“It did not surprise Fire that the man in the forest shot her. What surprised her was that he shot her by accident.”—Kristen Cashore, Fire

There you have it—a complete guide to writing a fantastic hook.

ProWritingAid has specific settings for creative writers and students, so it can help you write your story or essay. Try it out the next time you need to write a hook.

Good luck, and happy writing!

Be confident about grammar

Check every email, essay, or story for grammar mistakes. Fix them before you press send.

Hannah Yang is a speculative fiction writer who writes about all things strange and surreal. Her work has appeared in Analog Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, The Dark, and elsewhere, and two of her stories have been finalists for the Locus Award. Her favorite hobbies include watercolor painting, playing guitar, and rock climbing. You can follow her work on hannahyang.com, or subscribe to her newsletter for publication updates.

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Essay Writing Guide

Hook Example

Learn How to Write an Essay Hook, With Examples

16 min read

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Are your essays failing to keep readers interested? Struggling to maintain engagement throughout? 

If you don't grab attention from the start, readers might click away or never even begin. But how can we make sure that does not happen? 

An essay hook is what you need to meet this challenge. It is an attention grabber that hooks your reader’s interest. 

In this blog, we'll explain how to write an essay hook and explore several engaging examples of hooks in writing. Additionally, we'll look at different types of hooks and offer tips for writing engaging hook statements in your essays.

So, let’s start with the blog!

• 1. What is an Essay Hook?
• 2. How to Write a Good Essay Hook?
• 3. Different Types of Hook
• 4. Hook Examples for Types of Essays
• 5. Tips to Choose a Good Hook

What is an Essay Hook?

Hooks for essays, often found at the beginning of an essay introduction , serve as an opening sentence that immediately grabs the reader's attention. These hooks are a common feature in high school, college, and various academic assignments.

Keep in mind that hooks are not the same as introductions; they complement introductions and make them engaging. A good hook should be self-contained, avoiding the pitfalls of being dull or predictable.

Purpose of Hook in Writing

An effective hook serves two primary purposes. 

• Firstly, it sets the tone for the essay by giving a sneak peek into what it's about.
• Secondly, it creates an engaging start that makes the reader want to explore the essay further.

How to Write a Good Essay Hook?

Here are the points that you need to keep in mind to write a hook for your essay. 

Step#1 Know the Kind of Literary Work

First, it is important to have a clear vision in mind of the literary work you have selected for your paper. Here you need to describe what a certain essay type demands and what types of techniques you require to support your arguments in your essay. 

Step#2 Create an Outline

Always create an essay outline to see how the information can be organized better and which points need to be highlighted. Try to find an attention grabber that adds to the significance of that point. 

Step#3 Who are You Writing for? 

Know your target audience and choose a way in which you want to develop your work. Your hook statement should be according to it. If you are writing for students, write in simple language. If you are writing for professionals, take the specific language into account. 

Step#4 Know the Purpose of Writing Your Essay

Choose hooks that fit your paper. Know the type of essay you are writing and its purpose. You can go for funny hooks if you are writing a paper on a light topic. If you are writing a conference paper, then you should be more formal. 

Step#5 Revise and Refine

After writing your hook, revise it to ensure it's polished and impactful. Ask yourself if it effectively grabs attention and sets the stage for your essay. 

Different Types of Hook

Let’s take a look at different types of essay hooks and explain them briefly with examples. 

Type 1: Question Hook

A question hook is when you start something, like a story or an essay, by asking a question. It's a way to immediately get people thinking about what you're going to say next. It's like hooking their attention by making them wonder and want to find out the answer.

When posing a question, think about the interest of the reader and the things they would want to learn more about. Avoid making your question generalized or simple Yes or No questions. 

For example, asking a general question such as “Do you watch television?” won’t grab their attention and make them think it over. 

Always use rhetorical questions!

Question Hook Example

 Here are some hook question examples:

Type 2: Anecdotal Hook

An anecdotal hook is like starting your essay with a short, interesting story or personal experience. It catches someone's attention by sharing a real-life example or a funny incident before getting to the main topic.

This type of hook should be directly related to the central theme of the paper, showing its relevance and connection to the main idea.

Anecdotal hooks shouldn't contain cliched phrases or unrealistic scenarios that feel fake or unrelated to the essay topic.

Anecdote Hook Example

Let’s take a look at the anecdotal hook example: 

Type 3: Quotation Hook

A "quote hook" is a type of hook used in writing that involves opening an essay with a quotation from a notable person, a famous author, or a respected source. The purpose of a quote hook is to instantly capture the reader's attention and establish the relevance of the topic by providing an authoritative statement.

A well-chosen quote can add credibility to your writing, evoke emotion, or introduce a key theme that you intend to explore in your essay. It can also set the tone for the piece, whether it's persuasive, informative, or narrative.

Quotation Hook Example

For example, if you're writing an essay about the importance of perseverance, you might start with a quote like this:

Type 4: Statistical Facts Hooks 

Statistical facts hooks are when you start an essay with numbers or data to grab people's attention. The purpose of a statistical facts hook is to engage the reader's interest by presenting them with a surprising, statistic related to the essay's topic.

This type of hook is particularly effective when writing an informative essay or persuasive essay that relies on data and evidence to support the main argument. 

Statistical Hook Example

Take a look at the sample statistical hook below:

Type 5: Personal Story Hook 

Starting a piece of writing with a personal short story is a good idea when writing narrative essays or a college application essay .

It doesn’t have to be an experience that you faced firsthand; it could be something that happened with a friend or a relative.

Personal Story Hook Example 

Here is what a good personal story hook looks like: 

Type 6: Description Hook

This type of hook is like painting a picture with words. Instead of jumping right into the action or topic, it starts by vividly describing something related to the main idea. 

This draws readers in by appealing to their senses and creating a clear image in their minds. It sets the scene and gets them interested in what's to come. Descriptive hooks are most commonly used in narrative essays but can be used in any type of writing. 

Description Hook Essay Example

Here is an example of a description hook: 

Type 7: Metaphor/Simile Hook

A metaphor or simile hook is like comparing something in your essay to something else, using words like "as" or "like."It directly compares two things that are not related to each other. 

It's a way to paint a vivid picture in the reader's mind, making your point more interesting and memorable.

Metaphor/Simile Hook Example

Let’s take a look at the metaphor/simile hook example:

Type 8: Common Misconception Hook

This type of hook starts by talking about something that most people believe, but then reveals that it's actually not true. It's like saying something surprising to make your reader curious and interested in what you're going to say next.

Avoid adding information that's too complex or confusing, keeping it simple and straightforward to maintain clarity and impact.

Common Misconception Hook Example

Here is a sample common misconception hook: 

Hook Examples for Types of Essays

In academics, there are different types of essays according to their structure and purpose.  For instance, an argumentative essay is a serious essay written to persuade the reader of an argument. Whereas a narrative essay could be a light-hearted narration of an event. 

You can not use a funny question to start an argumentative essay. Similarly, you can not use a serious fact to start a funny narrative essay. 

The table shows hook examples for different types of essays:

Let’s explore in detail some interesting hook examples according to different types of essays.

Expository Essay Hook Example -

Argumentative essay hook example.

Here are two different hook examples for argumentative essay:

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Descriptive Essay Hook Example 

A hook example sentence for a descriptive essay is as follows: 

Persuasive Essay Hook Example

A hook example sentence for a persuasive essay is as follows:

Narrative Essay Hook Example 

A hook example for narration is as follows:

Compare and Contrast Essay Hook Example

Here is a sample hook: 

Process Essay Hook Example

A hook example sentence for a process analysis essay is as follows:

Cause and Effect Essay Hook Example

A hook example sentence for a cause and effect essay is as follows:

Analytical Essay Hook Example

A hook example sentence for an analytical essay is as follows:

Informative Essay Hook Example

Here is a hook example for an informative essay:

Research Paper Hook Example

Here is a hook example for research paper :

Hook Examples In Speeches

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Tips to Choose a Good Hook

Choosing a good hook involves engaging your audience, creating interest, and setting the stage for your content. Here is how to choose a good hook: 

• Know Your Audience: Understand the interests and preferences of your target audience.
• Relevance is Key: Ensure your hook directly relates to your content's topic.
• Shock or Surprise: Use shocking facts, surprising statistics, or intriguing anecdotes.
• Tell a Story: Engage emotionally with personal stories or narratives.
• Pose a Question: Ask thought-provoking questions that make readers curious.
• Quotations: Share powerful quotes from relevant authorities.
• Visual Imagery: Use descriptive language to create vivid mental images.
• Conciseness: Keep your hook brief and to the point.

To Sum it Up!

Now you know the different ways to start your essay or research paper. You are the one to decide which hook is better and more effective to use according to the type of paper. Don’t forget to take into account the preparatory steps and figure out what type of hook is best to use. You know that starting with a hook can make or break your academic essay. However, it is not always easy to come up with the perfect anecdote or statement for an opening line. 

Luckily, you can get help from MyPerfectWords.com . Our team of professional writers is ready to craft impeccable essays tailored to your needs, ensuring academic success without the stress.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is a good hook sentence.

A good hook sentence is a sentence that grabs the reader’s attention or compels them to read your essay further. It is supposed to make your essay more interesting and engaging for them. 

What comes first, thesis or hook?

The hook of your essay is the first line of your introductory paragraph or can be more than one also. But the essay hook is written first. A thesis statement follows it. It is included as a mini-outline of the essay and tells the readers about the essay’s content. 

What is a hook statement?

The hook is the first sentence of your introduction, and it should be interesting. A great way to start a strong introduction is by writing an engaging, concise, and clear hook. This will spark curiosity in the reader, which leads them through all that you have written about.

How long is a hook in an essay?

The hook is 1-2 sentences of your essay are important because they help capture the reader's attention. They will continue reading if they are interested in what you have to say.

What is the difference between a hook vs lead-in transition to the thesis?

A hook captures the reader's attention at the beginning of an essay with an intriguing statement or question. A lead-in transition smoothly connects the hook to the thesis statement, guiding the reader from the attention-grabbing opening to the main argument of the essay.

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Definition of Hook

Have you ever read a book that could not grab your attention after reading a couple of sentences? On the contrary, you would have definitely read a book that has immediately captured your attention, after which you were unable to put it down. Some books are magnetic, while others are really boring. One of the reasons could be the narrative hook.

Knowing this, authors share an important literary technique to keep their readers engaged in their stories, which is hook , or Narrative hook , which keep readers’ interest alive in the book. It appears at the beginning of the story , and may contain several pages of a novel , several paragraphs of a short story , or it might be only an opening sentence , or a single line.

Types of Hook

There are several types of hook:

• dramatic action,
• mysterious setting ,
• engaging characters ; and
• thematic statements.

Examples of Hook in Literature

Example #1: ragweed (by avi).

We come to know, from the very first line of Avi’s novel Ragweed , that this story will be a comical reading experience, as it reads:

“ Ma, a mouse has to do what a mouse has to do. “

A young countryside mouse named Ragweed leaves his big family behind and sets out to live an adventurous life in the big city. There he encounters some cool dudes and dudettes from the mouse family. Ragweed also faces extreme danger from cats, especially the founding member of F.E.A.R., Willy Silversides.

Willy, along with the vice president, decides to go to any length in order to defeat their arch-nemeses to the point of devastating the Cheese Squeeze Club. Now it is the time for Ragweed to come up with a cunning strategy and muster the courage to defeat the Felines First Brigade. However, this hook has played an important role in making the story attractive.

Example #2: Pride and Prejudice (By Jane Austen)

The first sentence of Jane Austen ’s novel Pride and Prejudice , is one of the most famous first lines in literature, saying:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

This line sets the plot ’s mood , and captures the attention of readers due to its contrariness and notoriety. It also tells about the marriage theme of this novel, and introduces ironic tone , which Austen uses structurally and verbally throughout the novel. The Author presents a thematic statement about the value of love and marriage in a society where women have difficulty finding husbands amid class prejudice and financial snobbery.

Example #3: A Tale of Two Cities (By Charles Dickens)

One of the most famous and brilliant opening lines in all of literature occurs in Charles Dickens ’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities :

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness …”

This line hints at the central tension that occurs between family and love, and between oppression and hatred. These opposing ideals show prominent structural figures, like Paris and London , Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton, and Madame Defarge and Miss Pross. The tone of the entire novel is set by this famous sentence.

Example #4: Feed (By M. T. Anderson)

Readers cannot resist an alarmingly satirical line of M. T. Anderson’s novel Feed, which reads:

“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”

This line helps to set the stage for the novel’s plot about a futuristic world, which is overrun by uncontrolled consumerism, and where humans implant computer chips in most of the infants at birth. Children do not need to go to schools, since they can Google to get information that they might need, and people need not converse with anyone, as they can IM instantly. Hence, the first catchy line gives an indication about the theme of this narrative, and hooks the readers’ attention.

Function of Hook

Authors use hook as a critical component of their writing, as it allows them to demonstrate to readers how their literary works are worth reading within the first minute. This literary technique hooks the attention of readers and appeals to their minds. Readers also get a great sense of entertainment through strong and meaningful opening lines that might stick in their heads forever. We frequently find the use of narrative hook in mystery fiction and suspense thrillers . Besides, authors use it in a number of ways, such as by employing thematic statements and mysterious settings, or using characters.

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How to Write a Hook (40 Good Examples)

As a professional blogger who has crafted hundreds of hooks for stories, articles, blog posts, and more, I understand the power of a good hook.

Here is quick summary of how to write a hook:

Write a hook by capturing attention with a direct, concise statement or question. Use emotional triggers, strong imagery, or surprising facts to engage readers immediately and keep them intrigued. A story or snippet of dialogue are also good hooks.

In this guide, I’ll share everything I know about writing compelling hooks, from definitions to types, tips, and 40 good examples.

What Is a Hook?

Table of Contents

A hook is essentially the opening sentence or paragraph of your content.

Its job is to grab the reader’s attention so compellingly that they are drawn into reading more.

Think of it as the bait on a fishing line or the flashy headline on a magazine cover.

For instance, starting a blog post with “Last year, I doubled my income using this simple trick…” instantly piques interest because it promises an intriguing story and valuable information.

Types of Hooks

There are five major types of hooks:

• Question hooks
• Anecdotal hooks
• Statistic hooks
• Quotation hooks
• Statement hooks

Question Hooks

Questions provoke thought and beckon readers to find answers. “Have you ever wondered what makes people truly happy?” This type of hook engages readers by directly involving them in the narrative.

Anecdotal Hooks

Sharing a short, personal story can connect emotionally with readers. “When I first started blogging, I made every mistake in the book – here’s what I learned…” This approach makes the hook relatable and builds a personal connection.

Statistic Hooks

Starting with a surprising statistic can shock or intrigue readers. “Did you know that 90% of startups fail within the first year?” Such hooks build credibility and set the stage for a discussion based on factual evidence.

Quotation Hooks

A well-chosen quote can lend authority or set the mood. “‘The only way to do great work is to love what you do’ – Steve Jobs. This has been my guiding principle in over a decade of writing.”

Statement Hooks

Bold statements can spark curiosity and debate. “Most people are wrong about how to become a millionaire.” This type of hook challenges common beliefs and encourages readers to engage further.

11 Tips to Write a Hook

Writing a hook that captures attention and drives readers to continue is an art form.

Here’s how you can master it:

1) Know Your Audience

The effectiveness of your hook entirely depends on its ability to resonate with your audience.

Consider their demographics, interests, and challenges. For example, a hook for a teenage fashion magazine will differ vastly from one aimed at retirees interested in financial planning.

Understanding your audience’s expectations and crafting your hook accordingly can dramatically increase engagement.

2) Be Direct and Concise

A straightforward and concise hook is much more likely to catch attention than a rambling opener.

Keep it short and impactful.

Instead of saying, “In this article, I will discuss several ways that can possibly help you improve your productivity,” cut to the chase with, “Boost your productivity with these five unmissable tips!”

3) Evoke Emotions

Hooks that tap into emotions can compel readers to engage deeply with your content.

Whether it’s excitement, anger, sadness, or joy, emotional hooks create a psychological connection.

“I never thought a simple decision could bring me to tears every time I remembered it.” This kind of hook can make the reader eager to find out more about your personal story or the insight you offer.

4) Use Strong Imagery

Visual hooks can transport readers to a different place or situation, making your opening memorable.

“Imagine a world where every morning, you wake up to the sound of waves gently crashing against the shore.”

This not only sets a scene but also engages the senses, making your content more appealing.

5) Offer a Solution or Promise

People often read content looking for solutions.

A hook that promises a payoff can be highly effective. “Eliminate back pain forever with this one simple exercise!” promises a significant benefit, making it more likely that the reader will stick around to learn more.

6) Create a Sense of Urgency

Hooks that convey urgency push readers to act immediately, whether it’s reading a post or buying a product.

“Don’t miss out! Learn the secrets to instant stress relief available only for today.”

Such hooks make the content feel essential and time-sensitive.

7) Experiment with Different Hook Types

Each piece of writing is unique, and different hooks work for different types of content.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with various styles to find what best suits your piece.

A humorous anecdote might work better in some cases, while a shocking statistic might be more effective in others.

What Makes a Powerful Hook?

A powerful hook grabs attention, resonates emotionally, or intellectually stimulates the reader.

It’s precise, unexpected, and seamlessly transitions into the rest of your content. A good hook not only intrigues but also promises something that the rest of the text delivers.

Key Characteristics of a Powerful Hook:

• Precision: A strong hook is clear and focused. It directly addresses something that is crucial to the reader, making it impossible for them to pass by without wanting to dive deeper.
• Surprise: Incorporating an element of surprise in your hook can jolt the reader into paying attention. Whether it’s a startling statistic, an unusual fact, or an unexpected twist in phrasing, surprise makes your content stand out.
• Seamless Transition: The best hooks are those that naturally lead the reader into the body of the text. They serve as a smooth segue that enhances the reader’s curiosity about what follows.

To create such effective hooks, consider tips:

• Start with a conflict: Introduce a problem or conflict right away to create immediate tension and intrigue. This could be as simple as posing a dilemma or as complex as starting in the middle of an action sequence.
• Invoke the senses: Use vivid language to tap into the reader’s sensory experiences. Describing a sound, a smell, or a tactile sensation can vividly pull readers into the scene.
• Challenge common beliefs: Present a statement that contradicts common knowledge or popular opinion. This not only piques interest but also prompts readers to reconsider their assumptions.
• Use dialogue: Opening with a snippet of dialogue can be an effective way to drop readers directly into the scene, providing immediate context and character insights.
• Include a compelling character insight: Introduce a character in a way that showcases a unique trait or dilemma. This can make the reader immediately care about what happens to the character.

Hook Examples (for Different Types of Writing)

Here are some good hook examples.

Story Hooks

“Under the light of a blood-red moon, she vowed to uncover the truth, even if it led her into the heart of darkness itself.” This hook sets the stage for a thrilling mystery or adventure story.

“As the clock struck midnight, the statues in the garden whispered secrets of the old mansion’s past.” This hook immerses readers in a mysterious, possibly supernatural storyline.

“He woke up to find the city deserted, the silence an ominous prelude to the chaos that was about to unfold.” This opening sets a dramatic and suspenseful tone for a post-apocalyptic tale.

Article/Essay Hooks

“Scientists have discovered a revolutionary technology that could end global warming within the next decade.” This hook promises new, potentially world-changing information, drawing readers into the article.

“Recent studies show that the lifespan of the average person could increase by 20 years due to new genetic editing techniques.” This hook introduces groundbreaking scientific advancements, capturing the reader’s curiosity.

“A hidden environmental disaster bigger than the BP oil spill is silently unfolding in the Pacific.” This hook alerts readers to an urgent issue, leveraging the shock factor to engage them.

Blog Post Hooks

“I tried living without plastic for a month, and it changed my life. Here’s how you can do it too.” This hook combines personal experience with a guide, making it perfect for a lifestyle or environmental blog.

“Five years ago, I said goodbye to my 9-5 job; here’s why I’ll never go back.” This hook offers a personal testimony that resonates with many aspiring to escape the traditional workforce.

“How I traveled the world with just $100 in my pocket — the ultimate guide to budget backpacking.” This hook provides a tempting offer of adventure on a shoestring budget, ideal for travel enthusiasts.

Social Media Hooks

“This simple trick can save you hours on your daily chores. Click to see how!” This kind of hook works well on social media where users are looking for quick, practical advice.

“Double your workout results with this one little-known technique — tap to learn more!” This approach appeals to fitness enthusiasts eager for more efficient training methods.

“Are you making these five common makeup mistakes? Watch to find out and fix your routine today!” This hook uses curiosity and the promise of improvement to draw in viewers interested in beauty tips.

Marketing Copy Hooks

“Last chance to grab your dream vacation at half the price!” This hook uses urgency and the appeal of savings to encourage quick decisions and actions.

“Unlock the secrets to younger-looking skin with our new serum — first 50 customers get a 40% discount!” This hook combines the allure of exclusivity with a significant discount.

“This gadget cuts your energy bills in half—find out how and save big this season!” This hook promises financial savings and practical benefits, which are key selling points in marketing copy.

Speaking of story hooks, here is a good video about how to write them:

Final Thoughts: How to Write a Hook

Now, go write some hooks that no one can resist.

This guide should equip you with everything you need to start crafting hooks that not only catch attention but also transform casual browsers into engaged readers. Happy writing!

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73 Essay Hook Examples

An essay hook is the first one or two sentences of your essay that are used to grab the reader’s attention and draw them into your discussion.

It is called a hook because it “grabs” the reader and doesn’t let them go! It should have something in there that makes the reader feel curious and intrigued, compelling them to continue reading.

Techniques for Good Essay Hooks

Here are a few techniques that you can use to write a good essay hook:

• Use a Quotation : Sometimes, a relevant quotation from a well-known author or expert can help establish the context or theme of your essay. Next time you’re conducting research for an essay, keep an eye out for a really compelling quote that you could use as your hook for that essay.
• Start with a Statement that is Surprising or Unusual: A surprising or unusually statement will draw a reader in, making them want to know more about that topic. It’s good if the statement contradicts common knowledge or reveals an insight about your topic that isn’t immediately obvious. These can be particularly good for argumentative essays where you’re putting forward a controversial or compelling argument as your thesis statement .
• Tell a Brief Anecdote : A short, interesting story related to your topic can personaize the story, making it more than just a dry essay, and turning it into a compelling narrative that’s worth reading.
• Use Statistics or Facts: Interesting, surprising, or shocking facts or statistics work similarly to surprising statements: they make us want to know more about a topic. Statistics and facts in your introductions are particularly useful for analytical, expository , and argumentative essays.
• Start with a Question: Questions that make the reader think deeply about an issue, or pose a question that the reader themselves has considered, can be really effecitve. But remember, questions tend to be better for informal and personal essays, and are generally not allowed in formal argumentative essays. If you’re not sure if you’re allowed to use questions in your essays, check with your teacher first.

Below, I’ll present some examples of hooks that you could use as inspiration when writing your own essay hook.

Essay Hook Examples

These examples might help stimulate your thinking. However, keep in mind that your essay hook needs to be unique to your essay, so use these as inspiration but write your own essay hook that’s perfect for your own essay.

1. For an Essay About Yourself

An essay about yourself can be personal, use “I” statements, and include memories or thoughts that are deeply personal to you.

• Question: “Have you ever met someone who could turn even the most mundane events into a thrilling adventure? Let me introduce myself.”
• Anecdote: “The smell of freshly baked cookies always takes me back to the day when I accidentally started a baking business at the age of nine.”
• Intriguing Statement: “I’ve always believed that you haven’t truly lived until you’ve read a book upside down, danced in the rain, or taught a parrot to say ‘I love pizza.'”
• Quotation: “As Mark Twain once said, ‘The secret of getting ahead is getting started.’ That’s a philosophy I’ve embraced in every aspect of my life.”
• Humorous Statement: “I’m a self-proclaimed ‘professional chocolate tester’ – a title that’s not only delicious but also requires extreme dedication.”
• Start with your Mission Statement : “My life motto is simple but powerful: be the person who decided to go for it.
• Fact or Statistic: “According to a study, people who speak more than one language tend to be better at multitasking . As a polyglot, I certainly live up to that statistic.”
• Comparison or Metaphor: “If my life were a book, it would be a blend of an adventurous novel, a suspense thriller, and a pinch of romantic comedy.”
• Personal Revelation: “Ever since I was a child, I’ve had an uncanny ability to communicate with animals. It’s an unusual skill, but one that has shaped my life in many ways.”
• Narrative: “The day everything changed for me was an ordinary Tuesday. Little did I know, a single conversation would lead me to discover my true passion.”

2. For a Reflective Essay

A reflective essay often explores personal experiences, feelings, and thoughts. So, your hooks for reflective essays can usually be more personal, intriguing, and engaging than other types of essays. Here are some examples for inspiration:

• Question: “Have you ever felt as though a single moment could change your entire life? This essay is going to explore that moment for me.”
• Anecdote: “I was standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, looking at the vast emptiness, and for the first time, I truly understood the word ‘perspective’.”
• Bold Statement: “There is a part of me that is still trapped in that room, on that rainy afternoon, holding the letter that would change everything.”
• Personal Revelation: “The first time I truly felt a sense of belonging wasn’t in a crowded room full of friends, but in the quiet solitude of a forest.”
• Intriguing Statement: “In my life, silence has been a teacher more profound than any words could ever be.”
• Quotation: “Einstein once said, ‘The only source of knowledge is experience.’ Now, looking back, I realize how profound that statement truly is.”
• Comparison or Metaphor: “If my life is a tapestry, then that summer was the vibrant thread that changed the entire pattern.”
• Narrative: “As the train pulled out of the station, I realized I wasn’t just leaving my hometown, I was leaving my old self behind.”
• Philosophical Statement: “In the theater of life, we are both the actor and the audience, playing our part and watching ourselves simultaneously.”
• Emotive Statement: “There is a sort of sweet sorrow in remembering, a joy tinged with a hint of sadness, like the last notes of a beautiful song.”

For an Argumentative Essay

Essay hooks for argumentative essays are often the hardest. This type of essay tends to require the most formal type of academic writing, meaning your hook shouldn’t use first person, and should be more based on fact and objectivity, often at the expense of creativity. Here are some examples.

• Quotation: “Thomas Jefferson once said, ‘Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.’ If Jefferson were alive today, he would likely feel that this meed for a well-informed citizenry is falling well short of where he would aspire.”
• Provocative Statement: “Despite what romantic films may portray, love at first sight is merely a myth perpetuated by society. This essay will prosecute the argument that love at first sight is a myth.”
• Statistical Fact: “According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading psychological disability worldwide. Yet, mental health is still stigmatized and often overlooked. This essay will argue that depression should be seen as a health issue, and stigmatization of depression causes serious harm to society.”
• Comparison: “Much like an unchecked infection, climate change, if left ignored, can spread far beyond what it is today, causing long-term economic and social problems that may even threaten the longevity of humanity itself.”
• Contradiction : “While we live in an era of unprecedented technological advancements, millions around the world are still denied basic internet access.”
• Bold Declaration: “Animal testing is not only ethically unacceptable, but it also undermines the progress of medical research.”
• Challenging Belief: “Despite popular belief, the automation of jobs is not a threat but an opportunity for society to evolve.”
• Quotation: “George Orwell wrote in ‘1984’, ‘Big Brother is Watching You.’ In our modern society, with the advancement of technology, this is becoming more of a reality than fiction.”
• Intriguing Statement: “Despite countless diet fads and fitness trends, obesity rates continue to rise. This argumentative essay will argue that this is because medical practitioners’ approaches to health and weight loss are fundamentally flawed.”
• Statistical Fact: “Research reveals that over 90% of the world’s plastic waste is not recycled. This alarming figure calls for a drastic change in social attitudes towards consumption and waste management.”
• Challenging Assumption: “Society often assumes that progress and growth are intrinsically good, but this is not always the case in the realm of economic development.”
• Contradiction: “Western society upholds the value of freedom, yet every day, members of society cede personal liberties in the name of convenience and security.”
• Analogy: “Like an overplayed song, when a news story is repeated too often, it loses its impact. In the era of digital media, society is becoming desensitized to critical issues.”
• Relevant Anecdote: “In a village in India, the arrival of a single computer transformed the lives of the residents. This small anecdote underscores the importance of digital inclusion in today’s world.”
• Call to Rethink: “In a world where success is often equated with financial wealth, it is time for society to reconsidered what truly constitutes a successful life.”

For a Compare and Contrast Essay

A compare and contrast essay examines two issues, looking at both the similarities and differences between them. A good hook for a compare and contrast essay will immediately signal to the reader the subjects that are being compared and why they’re being compared. Here are sine ideas for hooks for a compare and contrast essay:

• Quotation: “As Charles Dickens wrote in his novel ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’. This could equally apply to the contrasting dynamics of urban and rural living.”
• Provocative Statement: “Despite popular belief, cats and dogs have more in common than society tends to think.”
• Comparison: “Comparing being an only child to growing up with siblings is like contrasting a solo performance with an orchestral symphony.”
• Contradiction: “While many view classic literature and contemporary fiction as worlds apart, they are more akin to two sides of the same coin.”
• Bold Declaration: “Android and iPhone may compete in the same market, but their philosophies could not be more different.”
• Statistical Fact: “Statistics show that children who grow up reading books tend to perform better academically than those who do not. But, the jury is out on how reading traditional books compares to reading e-books on screens.”
• Quotation: “As Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, ‘Sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.’ This statement can be used to frame a comparison between short-term and long-term thinking.”
• Provocative Statement: “Democracy and dictatorship are often seen as polar opposites, but are they are not as different as they seem.”
• Comparison: “Climate change and plastic pollution are two major environmental issues, yet they demand different approaches and solutions.”
• Contradiction: “While traditional classrooms and online learning are seen as separate modes of education, they can often blend into a cohesive learning experience.”
• Bold Declaration: “Though both based on merit, the structures of capitalism and socialism lead to vastly different societal outcomes.”
• Imagery: “The painting styles of Van Gogh and Monet can be contrasted as a stormy sea versus a tranquil pond.”
• Historical Reference: “The philosophies of the Cold War-era – capitalism and communism – provide a lens to contrast economic systems.”
• Literary Comparison: “The dystopian societies portrayed in George Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ serve as contrasting visions of the future.”
• Philosophical Question: “Individualism and collectivism shape societies in distinct ways, but neither one can truly exist without the other.”

See Here for my Guide on Writing a Compare and Contrast Essay

For a Psychology Essay

Writing an engaging hook for a psychology essay involves sparking the reader’s interest in the human mind, behavior, or the specific psychology topic you’re discussing. Here are some stimulating hooks for a psychology essay:

• Rhetorical Question: “How much control do we truly have over our own actions?”
• Quotation: “Sigmund Freud once said, ‘Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.’ This essay will explore whether this is universally true.”
• Provocative Statement: “Contrary to popular belief, ‘venting out’ anger might actually be fueling the fire of fury.”
• Comparison: “Just as an iceberg reveals only a fraction of its bulk above water, conscious minds may only be a small piece of who humans truly are.”
• Contradiction: “While it may seem counterintuitive, studies show that individuals who are more intelligent are also more likely to suffer from mental health issues.”
• Bold Declaration: “Despite advances in technology, understanding the human brain remains one of the final frontiers in science.”
• Statistical Fact: “According to a study by the American Psychological Association, nearly one in five adults in the U.S. lives with a mental illness. Yet, mental health continues to be a topic shrouded in stigma.”

For a Sociology Essay

Writing an engaging hook for a sociology essay involves sparking the reader’s interest in social behaviors, cultural phenomena, or the specific sociology topic you’re discussing. Here are ideas for hooks for a sociology essay:

• Quotation: “As Karl Marx once noted, ‘Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex.’ Sadly, society has not made much progress in gender equality.”
• Provocative Statement: “Social media, initially created to connect people, is ironically leading society into an era of unprecedented isolation.”
• Comparison: “Comparing society to a theater, where each individual plays a role, it is possible to start to see patterns and scripts embedded in daily interactions.”
• Contradiction: “While people often believe that technology is bringing society closer together, evidence suggests that it’s actually driving a wedge between people, creating ‘digital divides’.”
• Bold Declaration: “Human societies are constructed on deeply ingrained systems of inequality, often invisible to those benefiting from them.”
• Statistical Fact: “A recent study found that women still earn only 81 cents for every dollar earned by men. This stark wage gap raises questions about equality in the workforce.”

For a College Application Essay

A college essay is a personal statement where you can showcase who you are beyond your grades and resume. It’s your chance to tell your unique story. Here are ten potential hooks for a college essay:

• Anecdote: “At the age of seven, with a wooden spoon as my baton, I confidently conducted an orchestra of pots and pans in my grandmother’s kitchen.”
• Provocative Statement: “I believe that life is like a game of chess. The king might be the most important piece, but it’s the pawns that can change the entire course of the game.”
• Personal Revelation: “It wasn’t until I was lost in a foreign city, armed with nothing but a map in a language I didn’t understand, that I truly discovered my love for adventure.”
• Intriguing Question: “Have you ever wondered how it feels to be part of two completely different cultures, yet wholly belong to neither?”
• Bold Declaration: “Breaking a bone can be a painful experience. Breaking stereotypes, however, is an entirely different kind of challenge.”
• Unusual Fact: “I can recite the periodic table backwards while juggling three tennis balls. It’s a strange talent, but it’s a perfect metaphor for how I tackle challenges.”
• Quotation: “As Albert Einstein once said, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ This quote has defined my approach to learning.”
• Narrative: “It was a cold winter’s day when I first discovered the magic of turning a blank page into a world full of characters, stories, and ideas.”
• Metaphor: “Like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, my high school years have been a period of profound metamorphosis.”
• Humorous Statement: “Being the youngest of five siblings, I quickly learned that the best way to be heard was to become the family’s unofficial lawyer.”

Conclusion: The Qualities of a Good Essay Hook

As I wrap up this article, I want to share a few last tips on qualities that a good essay hook should have. Keep these tips in mind when writing your essay hook and using the above essay hook examples:

First, relevance . A good hook should be directly relevant to the topic or theme of your essay. The hook should provide a preview of what’s to come without giving too much away.

Second, Intrigue. A great hook should make the reader want to continue reading. It should create a question in the reader’s mind or present a fascinating idea that they want to know more about.

Third, uniqueness. An effective hook should be original and unique. It should stand out from the many other essays that the reader might be going through.

Fourth, clarity. Even though a hook should be captivating and original, it should also be clear and easy to understand. Avoid complex sentences and jargon that might confuse the reader.

Fifth, genre conventions. Too often, my students try to be so creative in their essay hooks that they forget genre conventions . The more formal an essay, the harder it is to write the hook. My general approach is to focus on statistics and facts, and avoid rhetorical questions , with more formal essay hooks.

Keep in mind that you should run your essay hook by your teacher by showing them your first draft before you submit your essay for grading. This will help you to make sure it follows genre conventions and is well-written.

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 15 Self-Actualization Examples (Maslow's Hierarchy)
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ Forest Schools Philosophy & Curriculum, Explained!
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ Montessori's 4 Planes of Development, Explained!
• Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ Montessori vs Reggio Emilia vs Steiner-Waldorf vs Froebel

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How To Write A Great Essay Hook (With Examples)

• Smodin Editorial Team
• Published: November 24, 2023

Learning the secrets behind an effective essay starts with understanding the power of a hook. Your hook is the opening statement of your introduction and ultimately acts as an invitation to your readers. It invites them to explore the ideas you’re presenting, while also engaging their attention for a long enough time to read your work.

With a great hook, you can improve your writing skills and set the stage for a masterfully written essay. But what else is a good hook able to do? And what kind of hook can you use to write an incredible essay?

This guide (complete with hook sentence examples) will help walk you through the steps of writing a hook and how to use it to boost your grades and make your work more compelling than ever!

What Is An Essay Hook?

An essay hook is the opening sentence or paragraphs of your essay and is designed to pique the curiosity of your reader while also holding their attention long enough to read the rest of your work. Think about it – would you want to read an essay if the first sentence is long-winded and boring?

Generally, writers use an effective hook to set the tone for the rest of the work and give you a quick look ‘behind the curtain’. The hook tells you exactly what the essay is about in a thoughtful and thought-provoking way that leaves you hungry for more.

For example: “ Did you know that the average person eats around five pounds of shark meat every year? In a shocking study by the Shark Lovers World Organization, it was revealed that around 4% of all fish-based products contain shark meat. ”

Of course, this isn’t true (at least, we hope not!). But it did capture your interest and make you want to find out more. That’s exactly what a hook does.

A good essay hook can keep your readers interested and helps to engage them in what you’re saying. It also leaves a lasting impression on them, which means you’ve accomplished your goal of starting a conversation about your essay topic.

Types Of Essay Hooks

With the many types of essays and writing structures you can use for your work, there are just as many hooks to suit your topic. But which ones are relevant? And which one should you use to effectively introduce your writing?

Below, we’ve listed some of the most common types of essay hooks to help you narrow down your search.

Question hook

If you start your essay with a thought-provoking question, you have a great chance of engaging your readers from the get-go. This is because a question can encourage them to actively think about what you’re saying and spark curiosity about what the real answer to the question is.

It’s important to ensure that your question is relevant and intriguing, but it’s even more important that it aligns with the theme of your essay. Usually, your readers will want to keep reading to find the answers in the body of your essay.

Quotation hook

When you open your essay with a quote from a notable person or reputable organization, you add credibility to your work. This can be particularly important when you’re discussing a topic that needs expertise to build trust.

After you use a relevant quote, you’ll also need to explain why it’s relevant to set the stage for the discussion or argument that you’re presenting.

Statistic hook

Introducing your topic with a compelling statistic or data is another great way to add credibility to your paper. It shows your reader that you’ve done your research, and you have proof to back up the claims that you may be making in the body of your essay.

It’s essential to use statistics that are accurate, though, and they should come from credible sources. Otherwise, you may be undermining your work, which could lead to losing the trust of your reader.

Anecdote hook

The last time I started an essay with an anecdote, my professor gave my work a stellar review and I got the best grades in my class .

Did we grab your attention? Good. That’s how an anecdote hook works. An anecdote is a short personal story that establishes trust with your reader and creates an emotional connection. It can also add a layer of interest to narrative or descriptive essays.

In some essays, you can write an anecdotal hook from the perspective of a fictional character. As long as it sounds like a personal experience, it should reel your readers in.

Surprising statement hook

If you can, try to capture your reader’s attention with a bold or unexpected statement. When you catch them off guard, you can stimulate their curiosity. They’re going to want to keep reading to see how you address or support your surprising statement.

You can use this type of hook in several different ways. Whether you’re challenging a common misconception, giving counterintuitive insights, or presenting intriguing facts that will wow or shock your reader, you can start your essay off on the right note.

Description hook

A description hook helps to engage readers by painting an image or setting a scene using descriptive language. Typically, it appeals to the senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) and describes something in enough detail that it makes the reader feel as if they’re actually experiencing it for themselves!

This type of hook is suited for narrative or descriptive essays because it allows you to set the tone, establish a certain atmosphere, and even evoke an emotional response in your reader. In turn, the reader becomes fully immersed in the scene that you’re setting.

How To Write A Great Essay Hook

Now that you understand the basics, it’s time to put your pen to paper (or fingers to the keyboard) and write a hook that will draw readers in and keep them reading. If you follow the steps we’ve outlined below, you’re sure to craft a hook that will reel in your audience – hook, line, and sinker .

1. Know your audience

Knowing your audience is perhaps one of the most important things to consider when you’re writing an essay hook. Are you writing for your teachers, peers, or a broader audience? Once you know that, you can move on to understanding their motives, and values, and how their emotions will affect how impactful your hook is.

Creating a connection with your audience grabs the reader’s attention and encourages them to keep reading your essay. And, by fostering this connection, you can make them more receptive to the message you’re trying to convey.

2. Understand the purpose of your essay

Before you can write your hook, you’ll need to know what the purpose of your essay is. Generally, your essay will try to inform, persuade, or narrate your subject. Either way, narrowing down the motivation behind writing the essay will help you on your quest to write a hook that suits your writing.

Your hook should always align with the concept of your essay since it’s used to introduce the main theme or argument. You can think of it as a preview of what you’re going to talk about – it gives your readers a glimpse into the direction of your written work and sets expectations for what your essay will cover.

3. Choose the right type of hook

The type of essay hook you choose significantly impacts your essay’s style and whether it will keep your reader’s interest. You can pick from a question, quotation, anecdotal hook, or any of the others we’ve listed.

By carefully selecting what types of hook sentences will captivate your reader and establish the right tone for your essay, you’re guaranteed to have a compelling introduction. You just need to make sure that your hook suits the essay you’re writing.

For example, if you’re writing a personal story hook as an introduction to a historical essay that relies on a chronological structure, it wouldn’t be very impactful. Instead, a quotation or statistic hook may be better suited to an academic essay like this.

4. Make sure your hook is relevant

Relevance is the key to creating a compelling essay hook. The hook should always connect to the topic of your essay, and the link between the two needs to be clear from the get-go.

This does mean, however, that you need to avoid unrelated information in your hook. Keeping with the example of writing a historical essay, we can illustrate this point perfectly.

Say you’re writing an essay on World War II, and you’ve chosen a statistical hook to open your writing. Adding statistics about coffee sales during the same time period is completely irrelevant and won’t have much of an impact.

Unrelated hooks can confuse your audience and completely lose the reader’s interest. On the other hand, a focused and relevant hook can grab the reader’s attention and make your essay more exciting.

5. Spark curiosity

The way that you phrase your essay hook is just as important as the type of hook you use. Ideally, your hook should excite the reader and spark curiosity that makes them want to keep reading.

A poorly worded hook can be confusing or – let’s face it – boring! And you don’t want to bore your audience before they even get past your introduction. Whether you’re asking a question or introducing the topic for your ideas, your hook should set the stage for the rest of your essay.

You may need to use some creativity for this step. But putting yourself in the shoes of your reader can help. Ask yourself ‘What would make me want to keep reading?’. Your answer is usually a good place to start!

6. Keep it short

Although an attention-grabbing hook is ideal, it’s essential to keep it short. You should focus on using impactful language that can effectively convey your message. This is mainly because a shorter hook can keep your reader’s attention without overwhelming them with too much information.

Remember, it’s all about balance. When it comes to essay hooks, you want to strike a balance between capturing your audience’s attention and giving them a concise overview of what your essay is about.

7. Tweak the tone

The tone of your hook sets up the tone for the rest of your essay – so it’s pretty important that you align your tone with the topic. To do this, you first have to ask yourself what the tone is . Is it serious? Or perhaps you want to come across as humorous? Either way, you’ll want to maintain a consistent tone throughout.

A good example of this would be when writing a personal essay. In this case, an anecdote hook would be a great way to kick off your writing. However, if your personal story is serious, a funny anecdote isn’t necessarily the best choice. Instead, you’ll want to pick an anecdote that matches the seriousness of what you’re discussing in the body of your work.

8. Revise your hook with Smodin

After you’ve written your hook, it might still need a little nip and tuck to go from almost perfect to perfectly polished. To do this, you can use several different techniques to rewrite it.

But the easiest way to ensure that your hook is bulletproof is to use Smodin’s AI Paraphrasing tool . It can spin your words to sound like it was crafted by an expert – in a matter of seconds. It’s also a good way to avoid plagiarism and check your text to see how well it performs (the flow, tone, and relevance).

You can also use our free AI Writer to generate a unique, plagiarism-free, and professional essay in just a few prompts. This can help you draft a rough copy of your work before making any adjustments or modifications to your final product.

Catchy Hook Examples For Your Essay

With a better understanding of the types of essay hooks, and how to use them, you are well on your way to crafting an effective and attention-grabbing introduction to your writing. But, if you still need a little help with tailoring hook types to suit your writing structure, take a look at some of these examples of hooks for different types of essays:

Argumentative essay hook examples

Statistical hook: “ According to a recent study conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Americans generate around 4.48 pounds of trash every day. This highlights the urgent need for recyclable products and packaging to address this pressing issue. ”

Question hook: “ Have you ever wondered how our experiences as children impact our daily lives and our resulting choices as adults? This critical question has prompted us to explore the topic of childhood trauma and the profound implications that it could have on our futures. ”

Persuasive essay hook examples

Statistic hook: “ Did you know that over 1.3 million tons of plastic waste are dumped into our oceans every year? This alarming statistic demands our attention and immediate action to address the pressing issue of plastic pollution. ”

Surprising statement: “ In a world that’s run by technology, it’s shocking to realize that the average person spends more time in their day scrolling through social media than sleeping. The digital age has not only revolutionized communication but has also left us questioning the true value of our time and relationships. ”

Narrative essay hook examples

Anecdotal hook: “ Raindrops tapped lightly on the window pane, and the slight rustling of the leaves seemed to whisper secrets in the wind. Little did I know that this ordinary evening would soon become an extraordinary chapter in the story of my life. It all began with a letter—an old, weathered envelope that held the key to a long-buried family mystery .”

Question hook: “ Have you ever wondered what it feels like to stand at the edge of a cliff, staring into the vast unknown below? The adrenaline coursing through your veins, the wind tousling your hair—each moment pregnant with the possibility of adventure. What if I told you that such a moment would change the course of my life forever? ”

Compare and contrast essay hook examples

Quotation hook: “ In the words of Aristotle, ‘Excellence is an art won by training and habituation’. As we delve into the realms of two seemingly disparate subjects, we must consider how their unique qualities and shared traits contribute to the pursuit of excellence in their own distinct ways. ”

Anecdote hook: “ As the sun went down, the city lit up with its busy streets, and I stood there, feeling stuck between two different places—the lively city and the peaceful countryside. In that moment, I noticed how city life and rural living are alike in some ways but also have their unique features. ”

Can I use the same type of hook for different essays?

While some hooks are versatile, it’s best to tailor your hook to the specific essay you’re writing and the topic you’re covering. You’ll need to consider the audience, purpose, and nature of your writing before choosing a hook.

Can I use a combination of different types of hooks in one essay?

Yes, you can experiment with combining different types of essay hooks in your writing, especially if your topic allows for different approaches. However, you should always make sure to include a smooth transition between the hooks and keep them simple. Otherwise, you risk confusing your reader.

Writing catchy hooks is more than just finding something clever to say at the opening of your essay. It’s about leaving an impression on your reader that will carry through the body of your work and leave them hanging on every word you say. Ultimately, your hook can make or break your essay.

With Smodin, coming up with, writing, and revising your hook is as simple as one, two, three. So why not try out our tools to streamline your writing process? There’s nothing to lose – and everything to gain!

How to Write a Hook that Captivates Readers

A hook is a compelling opening sentence or paragraph in an essay or article. Its purpose is to grab the readers’ attention and entice them to continue reading. A hook must evoke an emotional response or pique curiosity to keep the readers engaged.

Are you trying to figure out how to write a hook? Stick around because this blog has all the guidelines you need to write one like an expert  paper writing service  provider. So, let’s get started!

Table of Contents

Types of Hooks for Essays

Your essay or  research paper’s  hook can be in any of the five types:

Anecdotal Hook

Starting with an anecdote is a good way to keep the readers interested. Ensure that the anecdote relates to your topic and makes your readers feel like they’re part of the narrative.

For example:

“Sarah sat at the edge of the cliff. The wind whipping through her hair as she stared into the vast expanse of the Grand Canyon. Little did she know that this moment would be the catalyst for a life-changing decision.”

This hook introduces a character, Sarah, and a dramatic setting, the Grand Canyon. Doing so creates intrigue and leaves readers wondering about Sarah’s decision. Here, the reader is immediately invested in the story and eager to learn more.

Question Based Hooks

Another effective hook is to pose thought-provoking questions. This type of hook encourages readers to engage with the content right from the start actively. 

Here’s an example:

“What if everything you thought you knew about success was wrong? What if the key to achieving true fulfillment lies in embracing failure and redefining your definition of success?”

This hook presents a series of thought-provoking questions challenging the conventional wisdom about success. 

Statistical or Factual Hook

This hook type is particularly effective when the statistic or fact is relevant to the main content. 

“Did you know that 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by February? Discover the secrets to making lasting changes and achieving your goals beyond the first month of the year.”

This hook uses a surprising statistic about the failure rate of New Year’s resolutions to capture readers’ attention. It entices readers to continue reading to uncover shared strategies and insights.

Witty or Humorous Hooks 

Humor and wit can be great ways to keep your readers interested and make their reading experience more enjoyable. If the content is funny or lighthearted, this kind of hook can grab people’s attention.

“They say the early bird catches the worm, but what about the night owls? Discover the surprising advantages of embracing your nocturnal nature and redefining productivity on your own terms.”

This hook puts a fun spin on a well-known phrase about night owls and productivity. 

Scenario Based Hook

This kind of hook appeals to their senses and feelings, establishing an instant bond.

“The sun dipped below the horizon, casting a warm, golden glow over the tranquil beach. As the waves gently lapping against the shore, a sense of peace and possibility filled the air. Beckoning those who dared to chase their dreams!

This hook paints a picture of a beautiful beach at sunset, creating a sense of tranquility and motivation. It provides a vivid image full of detail that draws readers in and captures their imaginations. 

Understanding How to Write a Killer Hook 

A hook is like a doorway to your content. It sets the tone for establishing a connection with your readers. 

It can be a stirring statement, an interesting question, an amusing anecdote, or a shocking fact.

Why is a Strong Hook Crucial in Capturing Readers’ Interest?

Having an eye-catching hook can be a major game-changer when grabbing people’s attention. It’s like a magnet, luring them in and making them want to read your writing.

If you don’t have a good hook, people might not stick around to hear what you have to say. Moreover, a strong hook also sets the tone for your entire writing. 

Examples to Understand the Impact of a Strong Hook

Compelling Statement:

“In today’s busy world, have you ever thought about how you can get more done in a shorter amount of time?”

This hook immediately grabs readers’ attention by talking about a common problem. It plays on people’s need to be more efficient and leaves them wanting to find the solution.

Thought-Provoking Question

“What if the key to happiness lies not in acquiring more, but in letting go?”

This hook gets people thinking by asking a thought-provoking question that goes against the grain. It makes readers question their own opinions and views. Luring them in to see what kind of answers the piece offers.

Intriguing Anecdote

“As the clock struck midnight, she found herself standing on the edge of a decision that would change her life forever.”

This hook straight away pulls readers into a dramatic scenario. Trying to spark their curiosity about the character’s problem. Makes them desperate to find out the results of their choice.

Surprising Fact

“Did you know that the human brain can process images 60,000 times faster than text?”

This hook throws out an unexpected and captivating fact that gets readers interested. It brings up an interesting piece of info. Also gives a hint at what more can be discovered in the rest of the article.

Pro Tips to Craft a Killer Hook

You can use the following techniques to write a killer hook.

Target Audience – Identification, Preference, and Interest

Before you write a hook, it’s important to understand your audience well.

To identify your target audience, consider the following factors:

• Demographics: Age, gender, location, education level, occupation, etc.
• Psychographics: Values, beliefs, hobbies, lifestyle choices, etc.
• Behavior: Online habits, preferred platforms, browsing patterns, content consumption habits, etc.

Understanding Target Audience Preferences and Interests

After identifying your audience, it is important to know their interests. Here are some guidelines from the expert  research paper writing services  provider. 

Surveys and Questionnaires 

Send out surveys to your audience to get their thoughts and feelings directly. Ask what they like, what interests them, and what captures their attention. Look at the answers you get to find out what people usually think.

Social Media Listening 

Keep an eye on social media sites where your desired demographic hangs out. Check out what they’re interacting with, what they’re talking about, and the kind of lingo they use.

Effective Hook for Effective Writing

Once you’ve figured out what your audience likes and dislikes, you can craft a hook that resonates with your audience. Here are a few ideas to help you do that while writing an essay:

Pinning the Pain Points 

Identify the challenges, problems, or pain points your audience faces and address them directly in your hook. For example, “Tired of struggling to find time for self-care? Discover a simple solution that fits into your busy schedule.”

Appeal to Their Aspirations

Tap into your audience’s aspirations, goals, or desires and use them to create an emotional connection. For instance, “Imagine a life filled with adventure and travel. Uncover the secrets to fulfilling your wanderlust dreams.”

Use Their Language 

Pay attention to the language, phrases, and terminology your audience uses. Incorporate those words in your hook to make it relatable and resonate with their communication style.

Focus on Relevancy 

Ensure that your hook directly relates to the topic or content you’re offering. Make it clear how your content will provide value or satisfy their interests. For instance, 

“Discover the latest fashion trends that suit your body type perfectly.”

Create Curiosity 

Intrigue your audience by hinting at valuable insights or solutions they can expect to find in your content. Pose a question or make a statement that sparks their curiosity and leaves them wanting more.

Impactful Hook for a Perfect Write-up

Stick to these guidelines below for writing an effective hook:

Keep Your Opening Sentence Concise 

The first line of your hook matters in getting people to pay attention. Keep it short, powerful, and interesting right away. Don’t waste time with long intros or too much background info. Drop a punchy sentence that sets the tone for the rest of your content.

Consider the following example:

“Unravel the mysteries of the universe in just five simple steps.”

Creating a Sense of Curiosity or Suspense

Creating intrigue can capture your readers’ attention and keep them hooked. Think of it like this: curiosity and suspense are like bait to draw people in. 

For example, you could open with a question or Statement that will make your readers want to know more. Or you could set up a scene that creates a sense of anticipation for what comes next.

“She stood at the crossroads, a single decision separating her from the life she had always dreamed of.”

This opening sets up a suspenseful situation. Makes readers eager to find out what choice the character will make and what the consequences will be. 

Add Emotions to Evoke a Strong Reaction:

Feelings resonate with readers and get an intense response. By tapping into people’s emotions, you can create an instant link and interest.

“Heart pounding, palms sweating, she took a deep breath and stepped onto the stage. It was her moment to shine.”

It creates an emotional connection and builds anticipation as readers root for the character to do well. Stirs up many feelings and encourages readers to continue reading to find out what happens next.

Key Ingredients of a Good Hook 

While writing a hook, ensure:

Clarity and Conciseness 

Make sure the hook is simple and to the point. Cut out any extra words that could weaken its effects.

Emotional Appeal 

See if the hook gets the emotions out of the readers you want. Think about adding or making the elements stronger to get the readers feeling something.

Relevance and Connection 

Make sure the hook is closely connected to the rest of the article. Tweak the hook to strengthen the link between the start and the rest of the text.

Language and Tone 

Be mindful of the words you use, how you say it, and the type of writing in the hook. Try to make sure it’s something that your target audience will like and expect.

Common Mistakes to Avoid 

Overly long or complicated hooks.

Avoid making a hook statement overly long. Long and convoluted hooks for writing can confuse or overwhelm readers. As a result, they will lose interest before they dive into the main content.

Using Clichés or Generic Openings

Using clichés or generic openings in your hook can make it predictable and uninteresting. Generic openings fail to capture readers’ attention because they offer nothing new or intriguing.

“Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there lived a brave hero who embarked on an epic journey to save the world from evil.”

This opening might sound familiar and reminiscent of classic fairy tales. Still, it doesn’t provide any unique or surprising elements. 

To avoid clichés and generic openings, strive for originality and fresh perspectives. Here’s a revised hook that takes a different approach:

“In the darkest corners of a forgotten realm, a reluctant outcast discovers an ancient secret that holds the power to reshape destiny.”

Failing to Deliver on the Promises Made in the Hook

When readers are hooked by an intriguing statement or a compelling question, they expect the content to deliver on those promises. Failing to do so can lead to disappointment and a loss of trust.

Ensure that the hook in essay accurately reflects the main content and sets realistic expectations for readers. Here’s an example:

“Discover the ultimate secret to becoming a millionaire in just one month!”

If the content that follows this hook doesn’t provide a legitimate and achievable path to wealth creation, readers will feel misled and may lose interest. While writing hooks, ensure that the hook’s promises align with the content and deliver valuable information or insights.

Writers need to use a catchy hook in their write-ups. It is like setting the tone for your entire piece, and it can create an emotional connection between you and your readers.

Hopefully, this blog post helped let you know how to write a hook for an essay. If you are still confused, don’t hesitate to count on the professional expertise of  our writers .

What is the purpose of hooks in writing?

How can i make my hook more captivating.

To grab people's attention with your hook;

• Stir up the reader's curiosity
• Paint a vivid picture in their mind
• Ask questions that make them think and say something that piques their interest
• keep tweaking until you get the perfect hook!

How do I ensure my hook is relevant to my content?

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What Is a Hook In an Essay?

When asked to write an essay most students ignore the need to express their own creativity and thoughts. Essays that are too formal or boring are often not read. As such, your priority as a writer is to ensure that your audiences are catered for and that the essay is written for them. This implies grabbing and maintaining the audience’s attention to make them want to read every word. One way of achieving this is by using an essay hook.

An essay hook can be understood in the same way as a fishing hook. It is something that grabs the attention of the reader and reels them in. The hook could be a sentence or set of sentences that capture and maintain the attention of readers.

For those still wondering whether essay hooks warrant this much attention, here is a general explanation. An essay hook is essentially the first thing your readers come across when they look at your text. It is the moment your readers decide whether to keep reading or to stop. In other words, the opening sentence of your paper (the hook) must be something special.

Five decades ago, the amount of information for reading was limited, and people were not as spoilt for choice as they presently are. Even in the assignment context, your instructor is likely to have scores of other papers to go through. If you fail to interest your reader within the two sentences of your essay, it is highly likely that they may stop reading altogether.

Before we look at the different ways you can start your essay with an attention grabber, let us look at some tips on structuring a hook.

How Do You Write a Strong Hook Sentence?

When starting off your essay, keep the main purpose of the essay in mind. Your choice of hook ought to relate to that purpose, and should underline the central idea. For instance, if the purpose is to present some fresh facts on a certain topic, it could be a good idea to begin your essay with some staggering statistics.

Part of writing a great hook is considering it as an integral component of the introduction, and the whole essay. Please note that, while the introduction does not present any major findings or facts, it plays a role in setting the mood for the entire paper. Part of the introduction is the thesis statement and the hook. The hook evokes emotions, while the thesis statement orients the readers on what to expect.

As you begin your essay, it helps to be substantial and interesting. To achieve this, you must have a clear picture of the main points you intend to make within the paper. Create an outline to ensure that no important information is left out. If possible, leave the writing of the introduction until after you have finished writing the body of the paper. This way, you are sure of what to write in the introduction. Writing the introduction after the body also helps you to pick hooks that are appropriate for the text.

So, What is a Good Hook for an Essay?

A scintillating hook immediately makes the reader want to go on reading. The art of picking the right information for your hook and turning into an amazing opening for your essay is something that you have to learn. Start by considering what you suppose your reader would find interesting about the topic of your essay.

Hooks can be quite challenging to generate, especially if you are still not clear on the contents of your essay. As such, the very first step in writing your hook is to conduct some planning, where you consider these presentation elements of your work:

• The type of essay you are writing
• The tone and writing style you intend to use
• Your intended audience
• The structure you plan to establish

It is customary for the hook to appear at the very beginning of the essay. Here are some options to consider as you choose your hook:

• An anecdote

An anecdote is simply a short story. When used as an essay hook , anecdotes can be used to make a point or gain the attention of the reader. Just remember to make sure that the short story used relates to the primary idea of the paper. The writer must establish relevance between the story and the topic.

Another option for starting your essay in a captivating manner is through the use of a quote from an authoritative source. A quote is particularly useful when writing an essay based on a story, book, or author. Including a quote from a reliable source at the beginning of your essay can lend credence to your text, and helps to strengthen your thesis.

• A general statement

You could also set the tone for your entire essay using a uniquely written general statement of your main claim. The beauty of this is that you get right to the point, and is good when working with a restrictive word count limit.

A proven fact or interesting statistic at the beginning of your essay is another bright way to start your essay. Statistical hooks attract the reader to wanting to know more about the startling figures. This type of hook is more appropriate for the informational kind of writing. The Implications of the statistics must be further explained in the paper, just in case the reader fails to notice the link.

This article highlights some useful strategies for creating an entertaining and attention-grabbing hook to start your essay. You could choose to use a quote, statistic, fact, or any other type of hook, as long as it suits the purpose and style of your paper. You could also finish up with the body of your paper before going back to complete the introduction and the hook. The most important thing is to make sure that each segment of your writing is interconnected, and aimed at supporting the thesis statement.

ENGL 1302 - Spaventa Summer 2024: Your ENGL 1302 Assignment

• Start Here!
• Your ENGL 1302 Assignment
• Finding Streaming Videos
• Finding articles
• Citing in MLA
• Group Activity

ENGL 1302: Annotated Works Cited for "Sonny's Blues"

This assignment will ask you to gather and evaluate information for Essay 3. If you turn it in on time, you will receive feedback that may help you avoid major pitfalls with the research essay. In grading it, I’ll be looking for

• Subject matter that addresses the content of Essay 3 .
• The right types of sources (see tutorials).
• The right number of sources (2-3).
• The correct type of citation style.
• Complete citations.
• Complete annotations.

Before You Begin

• Before you create a Works Cited, read the instructions for Essay 3 in Unit 6.
• Review Finding Literary Criticism and Finding Articles and Literary Criticism
• Review the slides: “Sonny’s Blues” and “Unit 7 Assignments.”
• Next, read about annotated bibliographies here:  
• Here is a model I made for you.

Search for and Select Your Sources

• Choose two or three sources from ACC’s databases to help you with your essay. These articles can be about music and community in general or more specifically about “Sonny’s Blues” and language devices. 
• You can ask a librarian for help if you need it. See ACC’s Library homepage for ways to get in touch with them: https://library.austincc.edu/

Write an MLA Citation for Each One of Your Sources and the Story Itself

• Use the Library’s webpage for specific formatting details: https://library.austincc.edu/help/MLA/
• See the PDF document for “Sonny’s Blues” info.

Alphabetize Your List

• In formal alphabetizing, we do not use the first letter of a or an or the to define the order. Use the first letter of the following word.
• For example, if the Works Cited entry starts with “An Evening of Muppets,” you would use E and not A to determine order.

Finally, Annotate the Sources

The content you should use for annotation is included in the page I linked in the Before You Begin section of this document. In short, you will

• Summarize the article
• Assess/Evaluate the usefulness of the content
• Reflect on how this source can help you achieve your goals of writing and language/tone/and music essay on “Sonny’s Blues.”

Aim for about 150-250 words for each annotation. You are only required to annotate two of these sources.

Important Information

You will submit a Works Cited entry, without annotations, at the end of your final essay, even if it hasn’t changed from this assignment.

While you are writing Essay 3, you may find out that you need more or different sources than the ones you submit for this assignment. It is OK to change sources as long as they meet the requirements. 

From ACC’s Library

Works Cited Definition

• An alphabetical list of the sources you use to write your paper.
• Works you consult during your research but do not borrow from are not included in this list.

Works Cited Formatting

• All sources are listed alphabetically by the first word in each citation entry and the end of each citation has a period.
• Double-space everything.
• If an entry runs more than one line, indent the subsequent line or lines half an inch from the left margin. This is called a hanging indent.
• Top of page and sides have 1" margins.

This assignment is worth 5 points. You may not revise it.

There is a separate document to explain Essay #3 itself.

• ENGL 1302 Spaventa: Annotated Works Cited

ENGL 1302: Essay Three - Music and Community in "Sonny's Blues"

James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is a story well-suited to the study of language and tone. It’s a beautiful piece that can be approached from a variety of angles. Also, the study of this story can be exceptionally rewarding. For this essay, I am asking you to approach the central idea and elements of language and tone with the guiding theme of music . Within the essay, make reference to personal experiences you have had, cultural observations you have made, or sensations you experience based on the text.

Before you start writing your essay, you will need to collect at least two supporting sources related to “Sonny’s Blues” and/or the power of music. You must perform your research through ACC’s databases. Then, you will create and submit your Annotated Works Cited.

Eventually, you will these sources to shape some of your paragraphs. In this way, you are collaborating with other people on your final product. Make sure you are choosing sources that make sense for your discussion.

Academic dishonesty is not just wrong, it can have extremely serious consequences.  That’s important to say because this essay calls for you to use other people’s ideas as well as your own.  If you consult a source without giving it credit, that is plagiarism, even if it is not intentional. Plagiarism is found in ideas, not just words. Here’s a refresher: https://researchguides.austincc.edu/documen Additionally, please review my policy on AI and ChatGPT.

Try not to get overwhelmed. Just follow the directions step by step and review the associated slides. I am also here to help. 

Prompt: Write a 1,000 to 1,500-word essay that discusses the central idea, language devices, tone, and their connection to music in “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin. Use research from 2 or 3 ACC database sources to help you develop your ideas, and add personal experiences to make the essay more dynamic.

The Research: Use two or three academic sources from our library’s databases to add critical weight to your essay. These sources should augment your discussion within the paragraphs and should not be stuck on at the end of the paper. That is two or three total, not two or three per concept or two or three per paragraph.

Central Idea

Your central idea for this specific essay should revolve around the power of music and preferably its effects on a community.

Title 

Create a unique title that reflects the spirit of your thesis.

• ENGL 1302 Spaventa: Essay 3

The Outline for Essay 3

For best results, follow the outline precisely. You should have exactly six paragraphs and a Works Cited page.

1 st paragraph: Introduce the story and your thesis. 

• Begin with a hook that relates to music and/or community.
• Make sure to include James Baldwin’s name and “Sonny’s Blues” in your first or second sentence.
• Instead of recounting the action of the entire story, characterize the nature of the relationship between the narrator and Sonny and then briefly summarize the final scene at the nightclub in two to three sentences.
• Example central idea/thesis. 

“Through (allusion or symbolism) , Baldwin creates a (one or two words for) tone to show the reader that music (finish the central idea statement) .”

This paragraph should include no research and should be written in the third person.

2nd paragraph: Support the central idea. 

• Rephrase the central idea you just introduced. 
• Support with textual evidence: one quotation along with a mention of supporting plot points and their relevance is usually enough to support the CI. 
• Make sure you aren’t summarizing here. 

If you use a research article to explain the central idea, make sure to cite it. 

3 rd paragraph: Identify the dominant tone of the story. 

• A few words for tone are cynical, disdainful, fanciful, gloomy, intimate, judgmental, jovial, optimistic, pessimistic, reverent, reflective, and solemn. Choose only one or two words for the dominant tone . This tone should also appear in your thesis. 
• Explain how it is manifested in the story and how it relates to the central idea. 

If you use a research article to explain the tone, make sure to cite it.

4 th paragraph: Discuss allusion OR symbolism. 

• Find two different examples of this one language device . 
• Do not discuss more than one language device (Discussing more than one language device may negatively affect your grade.). 
• Connect the examples to the central idea and tone. (This can be done in separate sentences.) 
• Additionally, explain what effect the language device has on you as a reader : What does it make you feel like? What memories does it evoke?

If you use a research article to explain the language device, make sure to cite it.

5 th paragraph: Personal Reflection

• Reflect on the story using the first-person point of view.  
• Here are some questions to guide you in your discussion. You do not have to answer all these questions:
• How can you apply the central idea from this story to your own life?
• How has music shaped your community?
• Is there a musical language within your family of origin or your chosen family?

This paragraph should include no research. 

6 th paragraph: Present a conclusion 

• Briefly review your main points: central idea, tone, language device.
• You may call attention to the importance of the story and reflect on its relevance.

Works Cited 

Put this on a new page. It must include the story and supporting references. These might be the same ones used chose for your Annotated Works Cited. Take out any annotations that remain. You should have no more than six items in your Works Cited, three are required: the story and two ACC database sources.

This assignment is worth 20 points of your grade. You may revise up to 16 points. 

Please contact me if you have any questions: [email protected]

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Your Mind Is Being Fracked

The historian of science d. graham burnett on what’s at stake in the rise of an extractive attention economy and how we can reclaim our attention..

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

I think a lot about the way we talk about attention. Because the way we talk about something is the way we think about it. What do you always hear about attention when you’re in school? Pay attention, as if we have a certain amount of attention in our mental wallet, and we have to spend it wisely. We need to use it to buy algebra, rather than buying gossip or jokes or daydreams.

I wish that was how my attention worked. It certainly did not work that way then. I graduated high school with a 2.2 because I cannot pay attention. I just can’t, to information delivered in the form of long lectures. I wish I could. I try. My attention, it just doesn’t feel to me like something I get to spend.

It feels — I don’t know. It feels more like taking my dogs on a walk. Sometimes they walk where I want them to. Sometimes I’m in control, and sometimes I am not in control. They walk where they want to. They get scared by thunder, and they try to run away.

Sometimes a dog side-eyes them from across the street, and they turn from mild-mannered terriers into killing machines. Sometimes they are obsessively trying to get a chicken bone. And even when I hurry them past it, they spend the whole rest of the walk clearly thinking about that chicken bone and scheming about how to get back there.

My attention feels like that to me. And this is what I don’t like about the way we talk about attention. We are not always in control of it. We may not even usually be in control of it. The context in which our attention plays out, what kinds of things are around us, it really matters. And it’s supposed to. Attention is supposed to be open to the world around us.

But that openness, it makes us subject to manipulation. You really see that now when you open your computer or your phone. It’s like the whole digital street is covered in chicken bones. There’s lightning cracking overhead. There are always dogs barking.

And I worry about this for my own mental habits, for my kids, for everybody’s kids. I don’t think we’re creating an intentionally healthy world here. And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this, and I keep feeling like we’re getting near it, but not quite there. Because the way we talk about attention, it just doesn’t feel rigorous enough to me. It doesn’t feel like it is getting at the experience of it well.

And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this, people who have found a better way to study attention or talk about it or teach it. Then I was reading this piece on attention in “The New Yorker” by Nathan Heller, and I came across D. Graham Burnett, who’s doing all three.

He’s a historian of science at Princeton University. He’s working on a book about the laboratory study of attention. And he’s a co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention, which is a kind of grassroots, artistic effort to create a curriculum around attention. And yeah, that got my attention. As always, my email, [email protected].

D. Graham Burnett, welcome to the show.

Oh, it’s such a pleasure to be here. Thanks.

So you’ve written that our attention is getting fracked. What do you mean by that?

Fracking. I suspect most of your listeners have heard that term. Fracking is mostly associated with this idea of getting petroleum resources out of the earth. But it’s a new technology for doing that. In the old days, pre major exploitation of petroleum resources, there were these big, juicy zits of high-value crude oil just sitting there in the earth, waiting to geyser up if you tapped them. Drill a hole — whew, gusher.

We’ve tapped all that out. The only way you can get the remaining petroleum and natural gas resources out of the deep earth is to pump down in there high pressure, high volume detergent, which forces up to the surface this kind of slurry, mixture of natural gas, crude oil, leftover detergent, and juice and nasty stuff, which you then separate out, and you get your monetizable crude.

This is a precise analogy to what’s happening to us in our contemporary attention economy. We have a, depending on who you ask, $500 billion, $3 trillion, $7 trillion industry, which, to get the money value of our attention out of us, is continuously pumping into our faces high-pressure, high-value detergent in the form of social media and non-stop content that holds us on our devices. And that pumping brings to the surface that spume, that foam of our attention, which can be aggregated and sold off to the highest bidder.

How do you define what attention is?

I would love for us to use this whole conversation to roll up on the shores of that deepest question again and again. So let me go at it one way. I’m in the process of finishing a history of science book about the laboratory study of this thing called attention since about 1880. In laboratories, using experiments, scientists have, since the late 19th century, sliced and diced a human capacity that they’ve called attention.

And it is that work that they did that has made it possible, I would argue, to price the thing called attention that we’re invoking when we use that fracking metaphor. It’s entangled with the idea of stimulus and response. The earliest experimental work on attention is about sitting folks in laboratory chairs and showing them certain kinds of displays, a cursor, a flash.

That triggering or targeting conception of attention has been the primary way that scientists, experimental psychologists, engineers, have conceptualized and placed in evidence a thing called attention. When they started doing early eye tracking experiments to follow where people’s gaze went, how much information they could take in at a glance, and figuring out how to quantify that — largely, it should be said, financed by friends in the emerging advertising industry — there was a kind of unholy symbiotic relationship that emerged between certain forms of experimental psychology and those who were trying to study how to sell mouthwash and cigarettes.

When those folks were doing that kind of work, they were certainly talking about a thing that was attention. They could call it attention. And it’s very similar to the thing that, right now, the most powerful computational technologies, the most sophisticated programmers and the most intricate algorithms are madly working to aggregate and auction continuously.

In your research, what’s been the holiest or most unholy attention experiment you’ve come across?

Oh, I love that question. Well, let’s do unholy. And maybe you’ll give me two. In the interwar period, a set of experiments called pursuit tests were used to train and assess the capability of military aviators. Pursuit tests were attention experiments, a little like forerunners of video games. Imagine a cursor that moves around on a non-computer screen. This is manual, like a clockwork cursor that’s traveling back and forth in front of you.

And you have a little envelope, a mechanical envelope that you have to move, manipulate kind of with a joystick, to keep bracketing that cursor as it moves around in front of you. And then we hook you up to a rebreather so that you’re gradually deprived of oxygen.

That’s a big twist. [LAUGHS] I didn’t see that one coming.

Yeah, we might also hook you up with headphones and run a lot of really loud and distracting noise through them. And we could also ask you to pedal or do other exhausting things with your body. There are a whole set of ways we could complicate this ecology. And then, as you gradually lose consciousness, you’re asked to continue for as long as you can, manipulating this envelope around the cursor.

This was understood to be an attentional test. It’s cybernetic, as you can see. It’s a way of integrating humans with machines. It uses attentionality as a way of measuring the kind of mechanization of the human subject in relation to a machine. Some people are better at it than others.

And let me assure you, if you’re going to put somebody in the cockpit of one of these very expensive fighter planes, you want somebody who’s really good at that. So I would call that one kind of an unholy — I mean, let’s be clear. I’m —

Yeah, fixating fighter pilots to see what happens to their attention. Yeah, I’ll categorize that in the unholy.

Yeah, I don’t want to sound paranoiac either. I’m in favor of fighter pilots who are able to pay attention —

Yes, I understand why they were doing it.

OK, yeah. Nevertheless, you can get a little shiver when you think about the way now, we’ve been, if you like, cybernetically integrated into our devices. And you can see aspects of that reality prefigured in the genealogy of experimental work on attention that I’m describing.

I’ll give you another one. The development during the Second World War of radar created unprecedented opportunities for defense capabilities in relation particularly to German U-Boats. Nevertheless, no matter how good your radar is, if the person looking at the radar screen isn’t paying attention to it, you’re totally screwed.

A really intense set of classified experiments took place during the Second World War to assess a very new problem — how long could people pay attention to screens? And what could you do to optimize their ability to keep paying attention to screens for long periods of time? That work gives rise to an understanding of the way people cease to pay attention, what comes to be called the vigilance decrement, the drop-off in vigilance to a statistically low frequency phenomenon.

And that work, too, can give you a little shiver to come to understand that there is, again, this deep, technoscientific story of studying a thing that we recognize as attention, but studying it in this highly instrumentalized way that is entirely bound to questions of stimulus and response, to triggering and targeting.

And we see the legacy of that kind of work, to this day, in the way we think about attention. That attention was sliced and diced in laboratories. And that very same thing is what’s now being priced with these calamitous effects in the way we experience ourselves.

I’m so interested by that form of attention. And it gets at something that has bothered me about a lot of the writing on attention and some of the conversations I’ve had on the show about attention, which is, it’s so wound up in this idea of attention as being something we should always have agency over.

I think that implicitly, in a lot of discussion of attention and a lot of research around attention, the attentional goal seems to emerge as a worker who never breaks focus on their task across the entire day. And so the enemy of attention in this telling is distraction. And I do feel that as a worker, right? I come in and I open my computer, and I immediately feel distracted by messages coming and Slacks and a million things.

And then, at the same time, that discourse, it points somewhere I’d like to go, but not the only place I’d like to go, right? I don’t imagine the good life as being a life where I have the attentional capacity of the perfect worker. Right? A lot of what I’m interested in theory with attention is, a sort of more open form of awareness, an ability to see other people more deeply.

And I’m a meditator. And so one thing I notice a lot, over time, is that what I think I should be paying attention to, and then what appears to come up with great value to me are not the same thing. Right? Too much agency over my attention, too much control is a way of not hearing other things in the world, too.

You put your finger on, really, the heart of the matter. So I want to suggest that part of what makes the conversation around attention right now, both so difficult and so important, is that secreted within that term are, in fact, two very different projects bumping up against each other.

In a laboratory, you use instruments. As it turns out, if you use instruments to get at a thing called attention, you end up finding an instrumentalized form of attention. Is that form of attention real? Absolutely. In fact, the technologies for making it real are powerful. You can quantify it. You can place it in evidence experimentally. Is it part of what’s in that sort of worker conception of attention that you invoked? Yes, as it happens, it is.

But that other thing that you’re kind of calling in when you talk about meditation, when you talk about awareness, when we invoke the sort of experience of being, the kind of ecstasy that can come with a certain durational flow of immersion in a person, a conversation, a book, the experience of reading, an object, that comes from a different place. It’s also in the language of attention, and it has its own separate history.

If you want to see both those operating now, let me give you two recent theorists of attention, both very prominent, whose accounts of what attention is are absolutely contradictory, perfectly paradoxical, but sort of both, interestingly, true. Two biz school theorists, Davenport and Beck, do a book called “The Attention Economy.” I think it’s 2001. They don’t actually coin the phrase, but they’re responsible for it sort of exploding into the collective conversation.

How do they define attention in that book? They say attention is what triggers, catalyzes, awareness into action. Attention is what catalyzes awareness into action. Definition that couldn’t be more different — the recently deceased French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, in a beautiful and difficult book called “Taking Care of the Youth and the Generations,” centers that book on attention.

What does he say attention is? He says, attention, playing with the “attendre” in French, is waiting, the exact opposite of catalytic triggering. It’s waiting. It’s, in fact, for him, infinite waiting. And what are you waiting on when you attend to an object? Wait on it. He says you’re waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are in the object. Which long webs of connectedness are a mirroring of the rich, long webs of connectedness that are in you?

So let’s imagine for a second that there was a painting on the wall of this studio, and you and I were looking at it together. We might look at that painting. It might be, let’s say, a religious icon or something. And you and I would bring to the experience of looking at it what we have. We would notice colors. We would think about other images like it we might have seen. We would think about the other images that might not be here, but that could be or the symbolic things that are in it.

And as we experience that kind of web of things that are in the image, we’d really be sort of seeing a long web of connectedness that’s in ourselves. And so, for Stiegler, attention is waiting on the disclosure of those long webs of connectedness, which are a mirroring of our own infinitude in the world. Attention, infinite waiting. Attention, triggering. Sharp contrast.

And let me try to bring in a third thing that I think is kind of exquisitely poised over and outside of that contestation between those two. In the early 20th century novel “Wings of the Dove,” the American novelist Henry James describes a really beautiful and intense scene in which a very, very ill woman, terminally ill woman, has a fleeting encounter with the doctor she desperately needs. She believes this doctor kind of knows what she needs to survive. She hopes that this doctor can kind of get her past her anguish.

The doctor’s very busy, and James depicts the scene where the two of them sit for a moment. And he describes the doctor as placing on the table between them a clear, clean crystal cup, empty of attention, an empty crystal cup of attention that the doctor places on the table between them. And that sort of figuration of attention as a kind of an empty cup that we place between ourselves and the object of our attention is like, I think it exquisitely invokes that idea of imminence, that kind of negative capability.

Anything’s possible here, the gesture of generosity. It has a little bit of that sense of waiting, but it also has a sense of a solicitation. Something needs to happen. So it includes elements of that catalytic, and it includes elements of that kind of mirroring, waiting image. And so, when I have to talk about what I think attention is, I’ll often use that image. Like, what’s attention? Attention is that kind of empty cup we can place between ourselves and the things we care about in the world and see what happens.

You’ve talked about how attention is — or at least the way we think about it now, is a modern construct. Can you talk a bit about that?

Let me give you one of the most amazing arguments about attention that’s ever been made by anybody, by my distinguished colleague Jonathan Crary. Jonathan Crary is an art historian at Columbia University. In a book called “Suspensions of Perception,” published around 2000, he made a super challenging argument about where that language of attention comes from and why, in the late 19th century, the same time that the scientists start studying it in laboratories, everybody starts getting worried about it and talking about it in a very particular way.

Crary argues that you don’t see a lot of discussions about attention in the 1780s, 1790s, even 1820. It’s not a thing. He says that worry about attention comes into being across the second half of the 19th century in a very particular way because of a very specific set of transformations in the experience of personhood. Imagine white guys in wigs with knickers on.

Those guys thought of themselves as a little bit like a camera obscura, right? Those boxes that have a little pinhole in them, like a forerunner of the camera. And the mind is like that box. There’s a world out there. There’s a world in here. There’s a nice mapping function between those two worlds. And therefore I, as a propertied white male subject, am good in the world because the world is out there and in me, in a relatively unproblematic way.

Crary argues, I think correctly, that that way of conceptualizing the human, the classical model of human subjectivity, implodes across the second half of the 19th century. What kills it? What does it end? We discover that, in fact, everybody doesn’t have the same picture inside themselves as what’s out there in the world, that we’re these oozy things made of meat, you know? And that actually, our eyes have blind spots. And suddenly the sort of physiological complexity of sensation makes a mincemeat of the classical model.

So then where are you in this kind of blooming, buzzing confusion of modernity now that you’re like an opaque, thick meat creature, instead of this nice camera obscura creature? Well, Crary argues that attention is born in that moment as a way of saying, again, that I hold together as one being, as I confront or encounter the world. Where are you? You are where your attention is.

Your will maybe, that’s that idea that somehow will has something to do with it. That for William James, attention and will were almost inextricable, right? That free will itself, if it existed, its locus was the moment in which I could choose to give my attention here versus there. And while everybody recognized that there was involuntary attention, there was this deep sense that attention was born in the late 19th century as a new language for talking about the coherence of the human subject.

Let me offer two responses that come to mind, and starting here. So obviously, he knows the discourse around attention much better than I ever will. But the first thing that I know where there was a lot of discussion and conversation about attention, going far, far, far back before the 19th century, is within religion.

So in Christianity, you have deep attention to attention among different kinds of monks and monastics. Buddhism has that. There are traditions in Judaism around that. I’m sure there’s much more in other religions that I know less well. Prayer is an attentional question. Meditation is a technology of attention as it gets talked about now. But you can frame it in much more spiritual ways than that. So what should that make us think that there was so much more, perhaps, attention to attention within the monastic religious traditions?

It’s a great question again, and I share your interest in those forms of attention. I do want to say that while it is certainly true that people have been concerned about how to hold before their minds and their senses objects since forever, and that religious spaces have been central zones for that sort of combat of the senses and the will, if one actually digs in on that stuff, the language often isn’t sort of the language we would use.

Contemplation, for instance, was a central preoccupation of monks.

But if you had brought them the kinds of questions that are getting asked by the early 20th century concerning that sort of stimulus response phenomenon or even the ways that William James will talk about attention, that would have been unrecognizable to them. That said, much of my own interest in attention actually comes out of my own meditational life as well. I care deeply about the spiritual traditions that inform our resources, as we begin to think about what to do now.

And there are some 20th century thinkers who have commented in really profound ways on the relationship between prayer and the thing we are now worried about when we talk about attention. The great French mystic Simone Weil comes to mind.

So Simone Weil, who skirted up to the edge of Christianity in different ways, but never crossed over, was a political activist, a labor activist, and ultimately, a kind of social justice martyr across the era of the Second World War, wrote passionately that pure, unmixed attention is prayer.

So for her, if you like apophatic attention, attention that won’t have an easy object or end or purpose. When I say apophatic, I invoke the tradition of negative theology, right? Two theological traditions. One where you try to get at God directly, one where you say, look, God is so beyond us. We’re not going to get to God. We’re finite creatures. God is infinite.

Our best chance to get anything like the God space is to enumerate everything that’s not God to get at God via the via negativa, the negative way. So we will enumerate the cloud of unknowing, rather than getting all puffed up with ourselves that we’re having a conversation with God.

I would argue that Simon Weil’s account of attention as a sort of radical, pure emptying of one’s self, an openness to immanence, is apophatic. It’s an attention that isn’t triggerable. It won’t target. You can’t bring it out in stimulus and response experimentations because it waits in a kind of ecstatic and infinite openness for that which it knows not.

So that’s the other question that comes up for me. There is an argument that what we are saying about attention now is just another moral panic of the kind we’ve been having since the early 19th century, that people were complaining about how we were losing our attention then. Trains were too fast, life was too fast. Everybody’s reading newspapers.

And it’s the same arguments, and yet, it’s all been fine. We worried about this with the advent of radio, with the advent of television. It just comes up and up and up and up. And then we just kind of move on to the next thing, and we worry about it again. And when people think about the attentional golden age, to the extent they imagine it, they don’t mean the 15 century. They mean right before whatever the thing they’re worried about now is, right?

Blogging was great. Social media was too far. Or if blogging was too much, newspapers were great, but digital news is too far. How do you think about that concern that you and me, we are aging and just part of a perennial moral panic?

I’m sympathetic to that critique of all this. By the same token, people have been deeply right, again and again, that things were changing. And things have changed in ways that were catastrophic, in addition to changing in ways that have been transformative and good. And some measure of what we need out of historical consciousness is the kind of critical discernment to make those judgments.

So, was there a moral panic about advertising in the early 20th century? There sure was. Why? Because people started experimenting with projecting advertisements using very bright lights, arc lamps on the underside of clouds. And everyone was like, this is horrible. I don’t want to read soap ads like on the night sky. And then people began to think it would be amazing to have amplified screaming ads floating in the air over cities so that you would have continuous barrages of sound advertisements in space. Also, horrible.

New technologies do really make possible new forms of human exploitation. This is real. The factory system certainly improved life in lots of ways. It made available much less expensive textiles, for instance. But you’d have to be out of your mind not to recognize that the aggregation of labor in the satanic mills of Lancashire created monstrous new labor conditions, against which people had to gather together and mount resistance.

I would argue that we are in a moment now in which this human fracking and the essentially unregulated commodification of this precious stuff out of which we make ourselves the instrument of our being, this is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this. And we need to mount new forms of resistance.

We don’t know yet what the forms of resistance will be, just like those early resistors in the factory system didn’t yet understand the way that labor politics and trade unionism would emerge as meaningful technologies of collective action. We don’t yet know what forms of resistance are going to emerge. That is what we need, is like all hands on deck for a kind of attention activism that raises our awareness. And this work is happening in lots of different places already. And we need to see what happens with it in the years ahead.

Maybe this is a digression, maybe it’s not, because you’re a historian who has dealt with this question, I think, a bunch. I’m fascinated by the way we think about past moral panics. Call them moral panics, right? The very term assumes just a hysteria that then went away. Often, when I go back and I read critics of a previous technological moment, it’s true on one level that, obviously, the world did not come to an end. We’re sitting here talking. And it is also often true that they were right.

You go back and read Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” and the thing he is predicting roughly will eventually happen is that we will think everything must be entertainment. And so even things that should not be entertainment will become driven by and assessed on the values of entertainment. And it is just like a direct line to Donald Trump. And you could say, oh, we had a previous moral panic about television, or you could say, all these people were right. The world didn’t end, but a lot of bad things actually did happen.

I think about this with advertising. Mid-century, there is a tremendous amount of critique and interest in the rise of advertising. You can read “The Affluent Society” by John Kenneth Galbraith, and he’s very interested in this question. And my sense is, among economists and others, that’s looked back on as a little bit embarrassing, right? Like, look, there’s advertising, and it’s fine.

And I don’t know. I’m actually amazed. I moved to New York about a year ago. I’m amazed at how much advertising is permitted on the subway. Public space, right? The subway I would go into for a long time, it had a grayscale image advertising “The Exorcist” reboot — horrifying image, like two girls, black [INAUDIBLE] dripping from their mouth. I mean, just grotesque. Every morning, I would see it.

And it seems a little bit dystopic. This is public space. Why am I being — why every morning, when I bring my five-year-old onto the subways, he’s seeing an ad for a horror movie? But we’ve just gotten used to it.

I’m curious how you think about this discourse, this sense that the things we worried about in the past, we were obviously wrong to worry about. And as such, worrying about things in the present is probably going to be wrong, too. Because eventually, we’ll simply make our peace with it, and the world will move on. And if it does that, then, clearly, it was fine.

Yeah. Where even to begin? Oh, my heavens. I mean, those who have worried that things were getting worse have been essential to our being clear-eyed about our condition again and again. The process by which money value has displaced other languages of value, big picture, that’s one of the enormous secular trends one can discern over the last 150, 200 years. And I would say many of the things you just invoked are, in effect, explicable out of that dynamic.

Now, I don’t want to sound reactionary when I say that, and I also don’t wish to kind of invoke some fantasy utopia of the past, but we are more severed from each other now than at any time in human history, even as we have this kind of ersatz experience of our being aggregated in new and powerful ways.

We’ve seen dynamics that simultaneously severed us from each other and created new aggregations, for instance, the rise of nationalism across the 19th century, which was a kind of harrowing ideology that created new forms of collective identity and displaced experiences of intimacy at the same time with monstrous consequences. So it’s totally reasonable, I believe, to be extremely uneasy about the dynamics that we’re seeing.

One thing that has, again, bothered me about a lot of the discourse on attention is, I think, because we don’t have a good definition of it itself, we don’t, I think, think about it very clearly. We know what we often don’t want. A lot of us don’t want the feeling, the fractured, irritated, outraged feeling we have on social media or online. We don’t like learning and noticing in ourselves that the amount of time we spend on any single task on the computer has dropped and dropped and dropped.

A lot of us have this experience of fracture. So we know what we don’t want — this. I don’t think we have a very good, positive vision. How do you think about the creation of a positive vision of attention, given the extraordinary diversity of human experience and wants?

Yeah, it’s a very hard question. In a sense, you’re asking both a question about authority and also asking a question about prescription. Are we going to prescribe for people this versus that, and who will prescribe? I think of the extraordinary definition of education that Gayatri Spivak offers, which is the non-coercive rearranging of desire. What’s education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

And that rings for you?

I have to say it does.

That’s not how my education felt to me.

Well, I don’t think a lot of our educations work that way. So I would say that that’s a richly humanistic and, at the same time, critical account of education. It’s not especially an account of education that conduces to making optimized workers in the labor force.

But let’s just sort of unpack it for a second. We organize our lives around desire in some basic sense. You say, we just tell people that they shouldn’t want, enjoy, receive that little dopamine hit, feel good when they’re scrolling through TikTok. Well, OK. Our desires can go lots of different places. It’s also possible for us to put our desires in places that ultimately lead to our being unhappy and lonely, not flourishing.

The question of how to organize our desires, how to know what it is we want that is what we really want, or what, in wanting, most dignifies and extends our experience of being, as opposed to, again, severing and impoverishing us. That’s the hard work of education. And people have to work that stuff out for themselves, but also, they have to work that stuff out with other people.

That’s, in a sense, why the humanistic tradition brings with it tradition, stuff, the kind of best that’s been thought and said — texts, objects. Here, here, look at this. It’s not, “look at this, I’m going to force you.” It’s, “I want you non-coercively to discover that in being with this in these ways, something good will happen.”

Yeah, let me hold on to this idea of non-coercion. So first, for me, education was coercive. I did not want to spend eight hours a day sitting in these small classrooms being lectured at. Just didn’t. I had to — which I don’t think is a bad thing. I am not really one of these people who thinks that childhood should be up to the whims of the child. I don’t think I would have made good decisions as a kid. I’m not sure the decisions made for me were great decisions either — but nevertheless.

And something that has been on my mind has been how bad, I think, parents, at least of certain classes right now, have gotten at coercion. And it worries me because my kids are young. So it’s kind of easy right now, but I know it’s going to get harder. And I see all these parents who know that they don’t think their kids should have a smartphone when they’re 11. And they fall because, eh, the other kids do.

And I see in this debate that we’re having right now about smartphones and kids, what I would describe as a real discomfort with how to be paternalistic when paternalism is actually needed. So Jon Haidt writes his book, “The Anxious Generation.” Part of the book’s thesis is that smartphones and social media have kicked off a mental health crisis in our children. Then there’s a huge back and forth on these exact studies.

And one thing I really noticed in this whole debate, where I think the research is very complicated and you can fairly come to a view on either end of it, is that if you convinced me that my kids scroll on their phones for four hours a day, had no outcome on their mental health at all — it did not make them more anxious — it did not make them more depressed — it would change my view on this not at all. I just think, as a way of living a good life, you shouldn’t be staring at your phone for four hours a day.

And yet, I also realize the language of society right now and parenting doesn’t have that much room for that. And I think we have a lot of trouble talking about just what we think a good life would be. Not a life that leads to a good job, not a life that leads to a high income, but just the idea, which I think we were more comfortable talking in terms of at other points in history, that it is better to read books than to not read books, no matter if you can measure that on somebody’s income statement or not.

And so I wonder not just about the non-coercive rearranging of desire, but I also wonder about — I mean, I don’t love calling it the coercive rearranging of desire, but the ability to talk about what we think we should desire or socially approve of, and then particularly for younger kids, for whom their attentional resources are being formed, actually insist upon that.

So I want to ask you back a question in response to that, which is, just, where do you anchor your intuition that it is, say, better to read a book than it is to scroll on TikTok for four hours?

If I’m being honest as a parent, right — and I’m not saying I would legislate this — I anchor it in my own experience of attention. I think books are remarkable and specific in their ability to simultaneously allow for a deep immersion in somebody else, right? Another human being’s story or thoughts or mind, and also create a lot of space for your own mind wandering. And I will say — and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to invite you on the show. We’ll talk about the School of Attention that you’re part of in a bit. I will say that my biggest concern and the concern that nobody really has an answer to for me, because I do want to send my kids to public school, is that I care less about how they are taught subjects than how they are taught attention, what kind of attention they’re able to bring to the things they will want to know. But again, the thing that worries me is that I see so little discourse like that.

I’m enormously moved by what you’re saying. The dynamics that you’re describing are not unfolding in empty space. They’re unfolding in relation to a basically unbridled dynamic of financial optimization. Like, we just can’t leave capitalism out of this. The system in which we operate is centrally driven by return on investment, not by human flourishing.

And there may be no other way to organize large, modern, complex societies. But we would be insane not continuously to hold before us the essential adversary here. The corporations are not on our sides. And the fact that a major split of our contemporary economy has figured out how to monetize not just our labor, but our actual ability to give ourselves to what we care about, is extremely bad for our ability to continue to be non-inhuman beings.

I think I’m getting at something similar when I talk about my discomfort with how hard we find it to criticize choice. People mean a lot of things when they talk about neoliberalism, and I don’t love the term, one, because I think it annoys people and shuts them down. But the other is because it’s imprecise. But the thing I mean, when I talk about neoliberalism and the neoliberal age, is a period in which the logic of markets became the logic.

Absolutely.

And I think it has become very difficult to think outside of market logic. And when I read older texts, I see a lot more discussion of the good of virtues of — and a lot of it is very religiously inflected, to be fair. I mean, religion was an alternative structure of logic of meaning that was in contestation with economic ways of thinking about that. I think as religion has weakened not only as an organized force, but as a kind of conceptual way of looking at the world, capitalism market logic has taken over a lot of that space. And the market does not have our interests at heart.

You invoke religion as one of the traditions on which one has been able to draw for a discourse of value that would not reduce to money value. I would invoke to other kinds of institutions that have been really important. There’s the space of education. I mean, I basically believe that a lot of what we do in the humanities is a training of attention.

And partially, that’s like why we have to hold on to and protect spaces for humanistic work in our education, because a lot of the other stuff can be instrumentalized. It’s part of the reason it’s getting increasingly exterminated from universities because you can’t monetize it. And but I say all of that just because interpretation or meaning is so inextricable from the labor of attention.

And there’s a third, which I also think is interesting to consider, which is spaces of art, music, aesthetics. I mean, artists have always made fun of the bourgeois collector who showed up with a giant bag of money and said, show me the most expensive thing, and I’ll take it. And the people in the know and the space of the arts would snicker and say, how callow that he walked out with that. That’s not the good stuff.

So each of those spaces, spaces of religion and institutions of education, study, teaching, and learning, and then museums and spaces of artistic production, symphonies, music, each of those institutions has meaningful traditions of non-instrumentalizable attention.

Is attention the category of the thing we want or a subcategory of the thing that we want? So sometimes I wonder if attention is a word like health. If I told you health is important, you’d nod your head. You’re nodding your head, in fact, right now. If I said, I’m really trying to work on my health, on the one hand, you would get what I meant by that. On some level, I don’t want to die soon and young for a preventable reason. But I also wouldn’t really tell you anything. There’s so many subcategories to health, right? You go to doctors for different parts of the body. And there’s mental health and fitness and different kinds of fitness and cardiovascular and strength. And sometimes when we talk about attention, it feels to me like we are talking about a thing like health, the entire basket of different forms of awareness and experience we use when we are moving through the world.

And sometimes it feels like we are talking about something very specific, right? Cardiovascular fitness, not health, right? And then alongside that, there are all these other things you might want to cultivate and be concerned about. Which one is it for you?

I think you put your finger exactly on that duplex nature of our discourse around attention. Both those notions are in the language of attention that we use. And I would argue that what’s important now is that we have the richest conversation about attention to surface it as our collective concern in the way that this podcast and all the podcasts you’ve done on this and the wide range of authors, like Jenny Odell and James Williams and Tim Wu, all these folks who’ve written on this.

We need more of all of that because — and here’s where your language of health is exactly right — what we need is a kind of almost revolutionary rising of our awareness around the importance of this stuff. I’m old enough to remember a period back when nobody went running. James F. Fixx, right? He wrote the book on running in — what was it — ‘77. Before that, regular people didn’t go jogging. They didn’t go running. People who ran were people who were sort of athletes or people in school because they were doing collective sports.

Also, there weren’t gyms that regular people went to. Right? There were places like Gold’s Gym, where you could go if you were a powerlifter or a boxer. I’m talking 1974 or ‘75. The whole idea that ordinary people would concern themselves with their fitness is something that’s emerged over the last 40 years. It’s staggering to consider the scale of the collective awareness of our physical well-being. Now, does that mean that health itself is a new idea? No, people have been worried about their health since forever. But the specific activation of fitness, that’s a relatively new thing, and it’s really changed in our lifetimes. And I’m proposing to you that that’s going to happen again. Over the next 40 years, a collective recognition that our wellness in our attentional lives, our hygiene and health and our attention, is going to be constitutive of our experience of being. This is what’s going to happen. It’s going to reshape education, which, as you’ve signaled, needs to be for and about attention. That’s what it needs to teach. And it’s going to transform our other ways of being together.

So you’re trying to do some of this. You have, along with others, this School of Attention. What are you trying to teach?

Yeah, I love this stuff. I mean, we think of the school as a little bit Black Mountain College, creative, artistic collaboration; a little bit like something like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, continuing education for people who want to read together and think and be together in person in a place; and then a little bit like the kind of radical labor schools of the teens and ‘20s, like the schools created by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which were more like activist projects to promote a certain kind of politics.

So that’s kind of the triangle in which we place the school. The school does not promote some single programmatic theory of attention. On the contrary, we’re interested in all the different traditions that can inform how we take attention forward. We had a senior Zen student do a course on Zen meditation as an intentional form. A class on cinematography as a medium in which attention is choreographed cinematically. A class on perfume where smell as a sensory modality is centered as a sort of attentional form.

We run workshops — and this is separate from the classes. We do free workshops. And the workshops are sort of opportunities to actually do some intentional stuff together, exercises in which people will, for instance, listen four times to the same four-minute piece of music under, again, different sort of mental orientations, but collectively, then take some notes and talk out what happened as they sort of used their attention.

And possibly the coolest thing we do at the school are these things called sidewalk studies, in which between 5 and 10 people will get together, usually a bar or a cafe, and they’ll read a carefully selected paragraph closely together and talk about it seminar style, having a drink. That paragraph is on a card. When you flip the card over, there’s a thing to do together, like a street action, like a kind of situationist style activity.

So an example would be like a great Audre Lorde passage on food in the city. The action is going into a bodega and actually examining the bodega for where surveillance is happening, where nourishment is happening, and then moving to the second bar and talking through what it was like to be in the space of the bodega with the Audre Lorde passage in our heads together.

And there are dozens and dozens of these exercises that are continuously being invented by folks in the school and doing them together. They do it because it’s a way of being together and practicing attention together to generate forms of solidarity.

I’m interested in that idea of practicing attention together. With my kids, when I think about this, one of the things that I wonder is when I ask, what do I mean by I want them taught attention? Some part of it is just I want them to have familiarity, a visceral, somatic familiarity with what different kinds of attention feel like.

I’m not sure I had that for a very long time. I’d, of course, experienced many kinds of attention, but it’s only later in life I become more mindful of what they feel like. And that’s helped me diminish the role of some in my life. The reason I’m not on Twitter or X anymore is that I don’t like the feeling of the attention it furnishes. I don’t like how I feel when I leave it. The reason I’ve sort of moved back to paper books is I do like the feeling of the attention. I notice that it is healthier for me. It sounds to me a little bit like something you all are trying to do is just creating contexts in which you experience different kinds of attention, so you have that internal map you can work with.

Absolutely. It’s a do by doing kind of thing. You actually have to come together with other people and surface the question of attention and then experience what giving one’s attention with others can do to be reminded of how precious that feature of our being is and discover what can be returned from the world to themselves out of opening themselves to it intentionally.

So I thought a good place to end here would be to do the deep listening activity, or at least a truncated version of it that you described earlier. So how do you lead people through this?

OK, so this would be an example of one of the exercises we might do at one of the attention labs at the Strother School. And we always like to make clear that we borrow from lots of different traditions. So this is very much like the kinds of exercises that the wonderful sound artist genius, Pauline Oliveros, would use in her practice.

It’s not exactly like her stuff, but we always kind of talk a bit about Pauline Oliveros, and we set this one up. And there are other sound artists who inform the kind of stuff we care about, Annea Lockwood and others. The exercise is going to have four phases. I understand that you’ve got a sort of sound piece queued up.

We’ve got it.

OK we’re going to actually play it four times. So your listeners have to be ready. You’re going to hear that piece of music, which is about how many minutes would you say?

I think we’ve cut it to 30 seconds or so.

OK, so it’s 30 seconds. We normally do this for a little longer, but all right. So wherever you are, get ready. You’re going to hear this 30-second sound piece four times. And I’m going to give you the mood under which you’ll attend to it. First, just listen. OK? First, listen.

Second listen, recall. What have you heard before?

Third listen, discover. What do you hear for the first time?

And four, finally, don’t listen. What do you find when you don’t listen?

So let’s talk back and forth. An observation about each of the phases. What happened in the first phase for you, Ezra?

The striking thing about listening to it the first time was the way my body’s response kept changing. So initially, it’s like you got these birds. It seems like it’s going to be a kind of nice ambient piece of music.

And then just like the intense, escalating tension, somewhat mounting dread, the noise goes up. The number of sounds happening simultaneously, it feels like it goes up. The volume goes up. So by the end, you’ve begun — or for me, I began as, oh, a nice — like, Jesus Christ, why did my producers choose this piece of music? So, yeah, it was a little bit — the first time, I was just on the ride of the bodily response to it.

For me, in the first attempt through, I was acutely attuned to 1,000 questions sort of pulling me in all directions. Because I’m accustomed to doing these kinds of things over a long time, so longer, more immersive, more people, so a lot of anxiety as to whether this kind of thing can work in this setting. So the truth is, I became aware about midway through that I was effectively not listening to the thing at all on the first time through, trying, but trying, but failing for me on the first one. We go to the second listen where we were trying to hear something that we’d heard before, recall.

The second one I was struck by — so I remembered the birds, right? I noticed they go on a little bit longer than I thought. And the second, I was a little braced because I remembered the feeling I had on the first. I was like, oh, as this keeps going, you feel worse. And so the remembrance was of what was coming in the way that then made me surprised by what was there in the moment.

Super interesting. This is so embarrassing, but I heard the birds for the first time in the second phase. [LAUGHS]

It’s not remembering.

That’s not. So it was a double catastrophe because I was like, how the heck did I not hear the birds in the first phase? My listening was so bad in phase one and two. Wait a second, I’m not supposed to discover new things until phase three.

So I had phase catastrophic disaster and felt bad about myself, but then sort of rounded on that and became aware of that inexorable march time that comes in and the harrowing fatalism that one associates with that musical mode. And so I had gotten to that in the first listen and was able to be like, OK, OK, I’m remembering that. I’m remembering that. Third listen, were you able to discover anything new?

Yeah, I was more attentive to the birds, so I was sort of tracking them. I realized they disappear. The whole piece, then, on the third, the thing I noticed was it feels like you’re clear cutting a forest, right? That felt to me like what that piece of music was, right? You were going through the forest. It’s initially fairly untouched. And then with each rising, I mean, the birds eventually falling silent, that tick, tick, tick, tick. When you talk about the fatalism of it, I mean, this felt like a piece of music that was about the clear cutting of an ecosystem.

Yeah, and I love — discovery for me involved a loop into how this piece came to be. I heard a twang that felt guitar-like, but I’m almost certain that the music was composed electronically. So I had a little moment of your engineer or your creatives, whoever’s back there making this, and were they at a machine? What kind of machine? What kinds of clips or samples were they drawing on?

So my kind of discovery, in a sense, was the sources and being recalled to the question of the sources of these sounds, these acoustic experiences. Final phase, four, you tried not to listen, Ezra. What happened?

It was more comfortable.

That body response to that kind of mounting dread, that anxiety, just was muted. So it was more like the way I listen to music when I work, where my attention is not on the music, and the music is providing a mood and an energy. Right? The music is a kind of stimulant.

What did you —

I’m not deeply immersed in it.

What did you do with the rest of you to not listen? Because, of course, our ears are funny. You can’t close your ears. So the stuff’s going to keep coming in. It’s not like our eyes. We’re —

Well, I moved to the eyes.

More of my attention was on what I was seeing.

Yeah, I did exactly the same thing. Did you close your eyes in the first three phases? Did you keep them open as you were listening? You did?

Kept them open on all.

That’s interesting. I closed them, but I opened my eyes on the final phase and had a little taste. It was quick, but a little taste of that foretaste of the ecstasy of trying to awaken my visual field, and brighten it such that it would displace my acoustic experience.

So I kind of had hyper vision for a second in an effort to blast out of my ears the acoustic experience by overwhelming it with the other sensory modality. And that was a little tremor of the good stuff where you can sort of feel an activation of what you can do with your attention as an aspect of being. I must say I enjoyed that.

So what’s the point of all that for you? If that is a successful lesson when you do it, what are you hoping people will have experienced? What is the meta lesson of that lesson, right? It’s not just what you heard in the music. What did we just do?

Yeah. I want to just admit that I’m not super sure, and that kind of uncertainty is part of it. And what I can assure you is that when seven or eight people get together in Brooklyn and do something like this for half hour or 45 minutes, we all come out of it feeling so good.

It just feels so right to be with ourselves and what our minds and senses can do and with other people in relation to what’s in the world this way. And I think that at this moment, we need to carve out more spaces for these kinds of activated experiences within our teaching and learning environments.

Let me end on this. If you’re somebody who’s not near the Brooklyn Strother School of Radical Attention, but are somebody who kind of senses something is wrong with your attention, wrong the intentional world that you inhabit, and you want it to be better for you, you want to find a space of what will feel like attentional health, where do you start?

Yeah, it’s a great question. And for my answer, I’m going to read one of the “12 Theses on Attention” written by The Friends. Thesis 9 of the 12 theses reads, “Sanctuaries for true attention already exist. They are among us now, but they’re endangered. And many are in hiding, operating in self-sustaining, inclusive, generous, and fugitive forms. These sanctuaries can be found, but it takes an effort of attention to find them. And this seeking is also attention’s effort to heal itself.”

So my answer is, find a sanctuary. It’s there. And your listeners out there, they all have their different sweet spots where they are able to protect themselves from the frackers. It might be gardening. It might be that they actually can weld. And when they’ve got their visor down and they’re in the puddle of the hot metal, that’s when everything is zoned out. They may be knitting, and they may be doing a Zumba class.

I don’t know what it is they’re doing that’s near you and what you would find and make possible, but find your people. And out of finding your people and with a measure of intentionality, insisting upon the sanctuary where you are resistant to being fracked, attention can begin to heal. And that seeking out of the sanctuary space is itself already part of the healing.

So then always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?

Oh, there are so many great books. And all we need to do is protect the ability to read them, and we’ll be good. Well, let’s start with one that I think is a deep and challenging and important book in this kind of attention space. And it’s by my esteemed colleague Natasha Dow Schüll down at N.Y.U. It’s called “Addiction by Design.”

Natasha Dow Schüll is a science and technology studies scholar, an anthropologist by training, and she did an extraordinary book on video poker machines, gambling machines in Vegas. It’s a kind of a pre-smartphone book about the engineering of addiction by the folks who designed those gambling machines and the environments in which they sit.

And if you want to have a kind of harrowing inwardness with the sophisticated, dark pattern technologies that can be achieved, even in the most primitive technologies, those machines are not fancy in important ways, right? They are a kind of 19th century printing press to a modern, full-color laser printer in relation to what we have now in our pockets. But already to see how sophisticated the design of those systems were to suck people in and hold them, it’s amazing. Natasha Dow Schüll, “Addiction by Design.”

A second book that I love and that also comes out of my field and that I think is a deep and hard but beautiful and important book for thinking about the history of science would be the book “Objectivity” by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston, both of whom are really great historians of science. That book is a history of something that seems impossible to historicize. I mean, objectivity doesn’t have a history. Objectivity is just being objective. That’s like transhistorical.

And they do an extraordinary and counterintuitive job of showing how radically historical our conceptualization of objectivity itself is, how entangled it is with shifting ideas of subjectivity, for instance, or the way that it plays off of the emergence of mechanical technologies for making inscriptions. So “Objectivity” by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston.

And then I guess my wild card book would just be a book I love and a book about the imagination, belief, dreams, and about America. It’s by Herman Melville, of course, the author of “Moby Dick,” a book I also love.

But I’m going to invoke his much stranger book, “The Confidence-Man,” which is a book about how belief happens and who the people are who can make us believe and about the sort of entanglement of hope and belief. It’s very much a book about this strange country that I love and believe in, and that has to make us all also very uncomfortable a lot of the time. Herman Melville’s “The Confidence-Man.”

D. Graham Burnett, thank you very much.

Total pleasure. Thanks.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith. Original music by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’

The steady dings of notifications. The 40 tabs that greet you when you open your computer in the morning. The hundreds of unread emails, most of them spam, with subject lines pleading or screaming for you to click. Our attention is under assault these days, and most of us are familiar with the feeling that gives us — fractured, irritated, overwhelmed.

D. Graham Burnett calls the attention economy an example of “human fracking”: With our attention in shorter and shorter supply, companies are going to even greater lengths to extract this precious resource from us. And he argues that it’s now reached a point that calls for a kind of revolution. “This is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this,” he tells me. “And we need to mount new forms of resistance.”

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app , Apple , Spotify , Amazon Music , YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts .]

Burnett is a professor of the history of science at Princeton University and is working on a book about the laboratory study of attention. He’s also a co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention , which is a kind of grass roots, artistic effort to create a curriculum for studying attention.

In this conversation, we talk about how the 20th-century study of attention laid the groundwork for today’s attention economy, the connection between changing ideas of attention and changing ideas of the self, how we even define attention (this episode is worth listening to for Burnett’s collection of beautiful metaphors alone), whether the concern over our shrinking attention spans is simply a moral panic, what it means to teach attention and more.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app , Apple , Spotify , Google or wherever you get your podcasts . View a list of book recommendations from our guests here .

(A full transcript of this episode is available here .)

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith. Original music by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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