How to Start an Essay Introduction

Three parts, and a budget most people ignore

An essay introduction does three things in order: it gives the reader something specific, it supplies the context that makes the question live, and it states the thesis. That much is in every handbook.

What the handbooks leave out is the budget, and the budget is where introductions actually fail. An introduction is about 10% of the essay. For 1,500 words that is roughly 150 — four to six sentences for all three jobs. Call it one or two sentences of opening, two or three of context, and one for the thesis.

Read that back against the last introduction you wrote. Most weak ones are not badly written; they are badly apportioned. Three sentences of warm-up, five of background, and a thesis that is either missing or buried in the middle of the paragraph is not a writing problem, it is a budgeting problem, and it is much easier to fix.

The opening sentence has a post of its own in this blog — six kinds of hook that work, four that always fail, and how to pick one for your essay type. So this piece spends its time on the two parts nobody explains: the context sentences, and how the paragraph is assembled.

The context sentences, which nobody explains

This is the part of the introduction that goes wrong most often and gets discussed least, so it is worth being precise about.

Context is not background. Background is what you know about the topic. Context is what *this reader* needs in order to see why the question is live and why your thesis is not obvious. The two feel identical while you are writing and are completely different on the page.

Two tests, both quick. Would the sentence survive unchanged in an essay on a neighbouring topic? If it would, it is background — cut it. Delete it and see whether the thesis still lands. If the thesis is just as clear without it, you did not need it.

In practice, context does one of three jobs. It defines the term the question hinges on, where informed readers would disagree about its scope. It names the standard position that your thesis departs from, so the reader can see that you are saying something. Or it establishes the stake and the scope — what turns on the answer, and what you are and are not covering.

A note on the funnel, since it is taught so widely. Opening as broad as possible and narrowing over five sentences wastes the paragraph a marker reads most carefully, and at any length under 2,000 words you cannot afford it. Start at the width you intend to stay at.

Why the thesis goes last

The convention is the final sentence of the introduction, and the reason is structural rather than decorative. Everything before it has been setting up a question. The thesis is your answer, and an answer that arrives before the question has been posed reads as an assertion rather than a position.

It has to be arguable — a statement an informed reader could dispute and that you intend to support. A thesis nobody could disagree with leaves the body paragraphs with nothing to do, which is a problem you will feel around paragraph three and cannot fix without going back here.

On signposting, there is a real distinction worth making, because advice on this appears to contradict itself. “This essay will discuss the causes of the 1918 pandemic” is a topic label — it describes the document, commits to no claim, and spends your most valuable sentence saying what the title already said. “This essay argues that the second wave’s severity was administrative rather than biological, by way of troop movement and press restriction” is a thesis with a roadmap attached — it contains a claim you could lose.

Whether to attach the roadmap at all depends on the discipline. Some rubrics explicitly ask for it; others read it as mechanical. Check yours, and if you do include it, fold it into the thesis sentence rather than adding a separate one — you do not have the words for both.

Two worked introductions

Where a real figure belongs these carry a [NEEDS SOURCE: …] marker rather than a number I cannot verify. Fill those from your own reading.

Argumentative, around 90 words:

A judge is handed a number: the man in front of her has a 77% chance of reoffending [NEEDS SOURCE: documented case of an algorithmic risk score presented at sentencing]. The system that produced it will not explain how. Risk assessment tools of this kind are now routine in sentencing decisions, and the usual objection to them is that their training data encodes historical bias. That objection is correct but incomplete. The deeper problem is procedural: a defendant cannot contest a score whose reasoning is not disclosed, which makes the tool a party to the decision rather than an aid to it.

Sentence one and two are the opening. Three and four are context — they name the standard objection so that the thesis can depart from it. Five is the thesis, and it is contestable.

Analytical, around 80 words:

The ghost in the third act never speaks, and nearly every production gives him a voice anyway. That choice is understandable — silence is hard to stage — but it reverses the scene’s logic. Critical readings have tended to treat the ghost as the play’s moral centre, the figure who finally names what the family will not. Read through the silence instead, he is the opposite: an absence the other characters fill with whatever they already believed, and the scene is about them.

Same structure, different register. One specific detail, the reading it departs from, then a thesis that could be argued against.

Five faults, in order of how often they appear

The funnel. “Since the dawn of time, humans have communicated.” Start at the width you will stay at. *Fix: delete every sentence before the first specific one.*

Background instead of context. A paragraph of general history before the subject arrives. *Fix: apply the neighbouring-topic test to each sentence.*

No thesis, or a topic label pretending to be one. “This essay will explore the effects of social media.” *Fix: write the sentence someone could disagree with.*

The buried thesis. It is in there, in sentence three, with two more sentences after it. *Fix: move it to the end; if something has to follow it, that thing is probably body text.*

Length. An introduction over about 15% of the essay has taken room from the argument. *Fix: cut the context first — it is almost always the part that grew.*

Write it last

You cannot introduce an argument you have not made yet. An introduction written first is almost always an introduction to a slightly different essay than the one that gets written, because what you argued is rarely exactly what you planned to argue.

The order that works: draft the body, then the introduction, then the conclusion. Leave a placeholder line where the introduction goes and move on — getting stuck on the first paragraph is one of the commonest ways an essay fails to get written at all.

If you have already written one first, do not throw it away, but do reread it against the finished body with one question: is this still the thesis? Usually it is close and wrong in a specific way, and the specific way is the most useful editing information you will get all day.