Hook Examples

Examples of possible hooks:

Writing Introductions for Narrative Essays

In-the-middle/Action hook:

          We were working at the laundry when a delivery boy came from the drugstore around the corner.  He had a pale blue box of pills, but nobody was sick.  Reading the label, we saw that it belonged to another Chinese family, Crazy Mary's family.  "Not ours," said my father. “That ghost! That dead ghost!” my mother boiled. “How dare he come to the wrong house?"  She could not concentrate on her marking and pressing.  “A mistake! Huh!"

-- from Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

Dialogue hook:

          “Have you dived in the pass yet?” the manager of the hotel asked the first evening, when we told him that we liked the diving.

          “No,” we said, “not yet.”

          “Ah,” he said, “You must dive the pass. The swiftness of the current, and also there are many fish.”

          “Sharks?” someone asked.

          “Yes,” he said, smiling as if he knew something we didn’t, “usually some sharks.”

-- opening of Michael Crichton’s essay “Sharks” in Travels.

Startling/Disturbing/Surprising Fact or Statement Hook:

          It is not easy to cut through a human head with a hacksaw.

          The blade kept snagging the skin, and slipping off the smooth base of the forehead. If I made a mistake, I slid to one side or the other, and I would not saw precisely down the center of the nose, the mouth, the chin, the throat. It required tremendous concentration. I had to pay close attention, and at the same time I could not really acknowledge what I was doing, because it was so horrible.      

-- opening of Michael Crichton’s essay “Cadaver” in Travels

Character or Setting Description Hook:

          Father was a stern straight man. Straight legs and shoulders; straight side-trim to his beard, the ends of which were straight-cut across his chest. From under heavy eyebrows his look was direct, though once in a rare while a little twinkle forced its way through. Then something was likely to happen. Our family had to whiz around Father like a top round its peg.

-- opening of Emily Carr’s essay “Time” in The Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr

Rhetorical Question Hook:

          What did I see that night I peered through the slots of the blinds covering the glass on my grandmother’s door? Was it the eyes of some poor dog or cat stranded in the sudden downpour of the thunderstorm, or was it my own psychic twin here to frighten me into being a more obedient child? To this day, I do not know.

Apt Quotation Hook:

          When I remember what Oscar Wilde wrote in “The Critic as an Artist,” that “there is no sin except stupidity,” I have to admit that my brother is the most sinful person in the world.

          From our earliest days, he was the dupe of the most amazing schemes, but perhaps the most serious and therefore most sinful of all was that incident where he . . .

End-of-the-Story Hook:

          The shackles the police officers had placed around my wrists chilled me farther than the bone—it froze me to the soul. The lifeless body lied next to my feet. Blood still stuck to my feet as I walked out of my home and the freedom I had once taken for granted.