Set the Scene, and State the Theme

Scene

This can be an actual physical happening or even a scene from a piece of literature. Paint a vivid and compelling picture of that scene; attach a few pithy and interesting thoughts then end the paragraph by stating your theme.” The thesis can be either a statement or a question that needs to be answered. Here is an example by a noted author speaking without the “I” in his voice. Be sure to include plenty of images and actions and be sure the scene includes the who, what, when, where, and why details your reader needs to read.

For Example:

Every day at 10:30 AM it’s the same: Kids dressed in pressed pants and Abercrombie shirts whip lacrosse balls at a shell shocked youngster in front of an oversized net. Their language would make a sailor blush. The smallest kid out there raises his middle finger behind the back of the large and lurking “upper schooler”–the obvious bully. Far off to the side two teachers are lost in conversation, oblivious to the teasing, taunting and mayhem going on in front of them. All of this is happening at one of the most prestigious prep schools in the country. It has to make you ask: who are these schools hiring, and are they qualified to teach our most precious resource–the children of America?

[The setting of the scene is in normal font. The stating of theme is bold.]

This is a great technique because it works so well. It piques the reader’s curiosity to hear more of the story–and it gives a hint that some greater moral will be explored!

But there are other equally compelling ways to begin your essay…

Allow Your Reader to Enter
the World of Your Imagination.

Take your on a journey through your thought process and subtly invite them to join you on this journey. In this type of writing, you need to include the “I” in your voice because you are asking your reader to join you–you in all your glory and decadence. Here is how Thoreau invites his readers to speculate on buying a farm. It is certainly not easy reading. Thoreau had no interest in writing to a lazy audience; he challenges us intellectually, socially, politically and philosophically. As a willing reader we know and respect that there is more than ever meets the eye on his writings:

For Example:

AT A CERTAIN season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer’s premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on it–took everything but a deed of it–took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk–cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of real-estate broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat?–better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said; and there I did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life; saw how I could let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring come in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. An afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, wood-lot, and pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to the best advantage; and then I let it lie, fallow, perchance, for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

~Henry David Thoreau, Walden: “Where I Lived, and What I lived For”

[The setting of the scene is in normal font. The stating of theme is bold.]

This opening paragraph takes us all over the place–but ultimately it states a clear and concise theme that Thoreau then goes on to develop in a detailed way through the rest of this chapter (which is an essay!) of Walden.

Thoreau’s good buddy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, takes this technique a new level in technique #3…

Engage Your Reader
in an Intellectual Journey

If you are excited by the possibilities of your essay, the odds are there are readers out there who will be excited as well. In this approach, which is best suited to a lengthy and complex essay, use a series of questions or statements or speculations that make your reader want to answer, question, or ponder them with you.  In the opening below, we see Ralph Waldo Emerson (another Concord writer!) introducing his legendary essay, “Self Reliance” in which Emerson invites us into his intellectual world—first by the selected quote and then by letting us in on his philosophical explorations of what it means to be a true and original thinker and why it is important to be “self-reliant.”

For Example:

  “Ne te quaesiveris extra.”

   “Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”

Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.

ESSAY II Self-Reliance

       I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is, that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

 ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

[The setting of the scene is in normal font. The stating of theme is bold.]

Notice in this opening that almost the entire opening paragraph is a stating of the theme. Emerson is writing to a pretty narrow audience–namely readers who are unafraid to tackle a complex and dynamic theme in a lengthy and erudite essay. There is a lot that Emerson introduces us to in this paragraph; likewise, the essay that follows is many pages long, but well worth the journey!

In the end, if your open works for your intended audience, it is a good open. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

But essays are no longer the exclusive domain of words etched onto a page. The video essay introduces a whole new ball game into the essay world!

Engage & Redirect:
Adding an Ironic Twist

This technique is a way to trick your reader into following an essay in a direction that is not obvious (and may seem contrary–hence, ironic–to the original direction of the essay. It works because it engages and interests your reader in what is ultimately only a sub-plot to a greater theme or thesis. This technique often takes up a significant part of the essay before there is a dramatic shift in the tone, content and direction of the essay.

John Breslan, a fantastic creator of video essays, accomplishes this with great effect in his essay “The Seinfeld Analog”

Check it out! It’s pretty amazing…

 Check out more of John Bresland’s Video Essays

The Power of Reflection

I’ll admit that most of my own essays openings fall into this category, probably because most of my essays are born in my journal entries, which are often simple musings that somehow start with my rambling on about some something or other in an honest and reflective way, but which evolve and narrow down into some sort of narrow theme. It usually takes several paragraphs before any succinct and unified theme–or as is usually the case– a number of themes are developed.

For Example:

Wendell Berry, a noted poet, novelist, and prolific essayist illustrates this technique in the opening of his essay “FEMINISM, THE BODY, AND THE MACHINE”.

Some time ago Harper’s reprinted a short essay of mine in which I gave some of my reasons for refusing to buy a computer. Until that time, the vast numbers of people who disagree with my writings had mostly ignored them. An unusual number of people, however, neglected to ignore my insensitivity to the wonders of computer enhancement. Some of us, it seems, would be better off if we would just realize that this is already the best of all possible worlds, and is going to get even better if we will just buy the right equipment.

Harper’s published only five of the letters the editors received in response to my essay, and they published only negative letters. But of the twenty letters received by the Harper’s editors, who forwarded copies to me, three were favorable. This I look upon as extremely gratifying. If these letters may be taken as a fair sample, then one in seven of Harper’s readers agreed with me. If I had guessed beforehand, I would have guessed that my supporters would have been fewer than one in a thousand. And so I suppose, after further reflection, that my surprise at the intensity of the attacks on me is mistaken. There are more of us than I thought. Maybe there is even a “significant number” of us.

Only one of the negative letters seemed to me to have much intelligence in it. That one was from R. N. Neff of Arlington, Virginia, who scored a direct hit: “Not to be obtuse, but being willing to bare my illiterate soul for all to see, is there indeed a ‘work demonstrably better than Dante’s’. . .which was written on a Royal standard typewriter?” I like this retort so well that I am tempted to count it a favorable response, raising the total to four. The rest of the negative replies, like the five published ones, were more feeling than intelligent. Some of them, indeed, might be fairly described as exclamatory.

One of the letter writers described me as “a fool” and “doubly a fool,” but fortunately misspelled my name, leaving me a speck of hope that I am not the “Wendell Barry” he was talking about. Two others accused me of self-righteousness, by which they seem to have meant that they think they are righter than I think I am. And another accused me of being more concerned about my own moral purity than with “any ecological effect,” thereby making the sort of razor- sharp philosophical distinction that could cause a person to be elected president.

But most of my attackers deal in feelings either feminist or technological, or both. The feelings expressed seem to be representative of what the state of public feeling currently permits to be felt, and of what public rhetoric currently permits to be said. The feelings, that is, are similar enough, from one letter to another, to be thought representative, and as representative letters they have an interest greater than the quarrel that occasioned them.

In the essay that follows Berry’s opening reflection is an erudite examination of marriage, households and the inherent fallacies of of political or personal dogma superseding and informing critiques of  lifestyle choices. It covers a lot of ground, but the good reader is ready and willing to join in, agree or disagree–but to relish the challenge of being intellectually challenged and to encourage reflective thought from the reader.

Read the full essay here.

Humor

Getting a Laugh While Making a Point

Years ago I dutifully followed my friend, eponymously named “The Rogue,” to an endless series of comic showcases in Boston where he was creating, testing, and polishing his craft in front of crowds in any venue that would listen to him. He plied his trade with the intent focus of a craftsman who somehow had to make his monologues of wit and wisdom resonate immediately with an always critical and rowdy audience. He didn’t have the luxury of a mere writer who (like me) could winnow his words in his own time at his own pace in obscure publications. His trade (and livelihood) required his audience to laugh–the hardest skill in any repertoire–right then and there in the moment. More than any writer I know he worked doggedly to craft and reshape his words to achieve not only laughs but a deeper understanding of the intersection of the universal  and parochial themes of life in a way that a wildly diverse audience could appreciate in the moment and, hopefully, in a deeper and more profound way.

We are “all” born to laugh, and we need to laugh–and laugh heartily! Knowing and discerning how to achieve those laughs is an ace in the hole for any good writer, for it breeds a respect for wisdom, and it engenders and perpetuates a bond with an audience who somehow feels intimately connected with the words and the ways those words are shaped and presented in a performance–and an essay is and always will be a performance of some kind!

When writing a humorous essay, the opening is the essay: no reader will labor through a mediocre opening in hopes that it will get funny at some point later on. To be effective, a humorous essay needs to know its audience and its leanings, but like any essay it needs to develop and deliver in both tone and content a unified theme in a funny way.

I am not by inclination a humorous writer, but I am by nature a humorous person. Much of my life is spent on stage performing as a folksinger. By hook and crook I’ve learned that winning over a crowd with some laughs is often is critical to the success of what I vainly consider my best work.

This short essay of mine was my attempt to inspire my students to rethink and retool the drudgery of writing a 500 word required essay explicating themes in The Odyssey. For the small and narrow audience I wrote it for, it worked! It got across its main point–that essay writing  can be a mind-numbing and confusing process, but it can also be fun….

For Example:

     Why am I the poor smuck saddled with a teacher who insists on finding meaning and metaphor in everything we read? Like The Odyssey: I mean, the book is full of random everythings. Like, just when Odysseus starts to figure something out (and I have a half a clue what is going on) he breaks of into some wild story with a hundred new characters. “Oh,” says my teacher, “that is a literary technique used to build the scope and sweep of the poem. It is the hallmark of an epic literary work.” If that is the case, then I have a crazy old uncle—a guy who never knows when to stop talking—who is probably a direct descendant of Homer. Yeah, from now on I’ll call him “Uncle Epic.” The only reason I half like the book is because I actually believe that I’m supposed to like it—or at least appreciate it.

 I can’t imagine that every English teacher for the last 1500 years or so is wrong. Maybe they’ve all been hypnotized by the Siren’s song of conformity. I liked that part of the book: Odysseus getting his crew to lash him to the mast so he could hear the Siren’s song, but still not do something stupid like get lured away by Siren herself. “Stairway to Heaven” probably had that effect in the 70’s when it first came out. Jeez, I’m as bad as Homer. Listen to me getting off track—and I shouldn’t get off track because this foolish essay is only one of six assignments over the weekend.

SIX!

Ohmygod…there was that six headed monster in the book, too. So life does imitate art. I’ll keep repeating to myself: “It’s only an epic; it’s only an epic; it’s only an epic;…” And if I don’t do my homework, then I’ll probably have to work in the yard. Oh no! That’s simply a metaphor for the whirlpool that almost sucked in Odysseus’ ship, How does a kid find his way in life? Monsters on the right, whirlpools on the left; so many Gods plotting how to make every day miserable. My teachers think they’re Gods sometimes.

Or at least they act like Gods.

Oh, for one bright-eyed Athena of a teacher to understand…

God, I’m probably going to fail this essay because I’m using the “I” in my “voice!” Not to worry. I’ll just rant and rage and think and write, THEN I’ll go back and change everything to the third person—you know, the guy we never really get to meet. Really, it’s like going on a date with a mannequin.

Somewhere in here is my thesis statement. I hope my teacher finds it. I hope I find it. I wonder if I just write what I know he wants to hear if he’ll go easy on me. It works you know; I tried it once. [Actually, I just looked and I couldn’t find my thesis statement. But, if he read this far and hasn’t flunked me then maybe he’ll read more. That would be kind of fun: Write something that keeps looking like it’s leading somewhere wicked profound and then say “April Fools” at the end.]

I wonder if my teacher would find meaning and metaphor in that?

I love these short paragraphs. I’m already well over the minimum of five paragraphs. I really wonder who the first teacher was who ever coined the term “Five Paragraph Essay;” There’s probably a statue somewhere. Ha, and the statue is holding a copy of The Odyssey in one hand and a gradebook in the other. LOL:) (Sorry, I thought I was texting…)

O.K. time to start writing: The Odyssey survives not because of what it is, but because of who it is. Figure that out for yourself my dear teacher—my teacher, who at this very moment is leaving to visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum for a day of “much needed” rest and relaxation, while we slave like oarsmen in a tempest over his stupid assignment.

New Bedford Whaling Museum! If he comes to class on Monday and even mentions Moby Dick, I’ll quit school. I swear I will.  I really don’t need him. I can make my own journey through life—and all because I read The Odyssey in 8th grade English class.

Where was I? This has got to be at least 500 words!

State the Facts

Coming soon…

Pose a Series of Questions

Compare & Contrast

coming soon…

Compare & Contrast

coming soon…