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.
