W 101 F

Introduction
The McGraw-Hill College Handbook says that "your opening paragraph should announce a general topic of your essay and be interesting enough to make people want to read on" (Marius and Wiener 117). An introductory paragraph usually announces the writer's subject, and orients the reader to what will follow. It creates an initial expression and indicates whether the main body of the text will be engaging or dull. But if writers really want to arouse the readers' interest, they may begin the essay surprisingly. They can start with a quotation, a question, with a list of words or even with a number.

In my research paper I will present examples of individual differences in writing introductions and differences in keeping alive readers' interest in the rest of the text.

Method
For the comparison I chose four essays from 75 Readings: An Anthology. The book is "strategically designed to introduce students to a broad variety of both traditional and contemporary essays" (xv). The collection includes two tables of contents, from which the second one arranges writings according to thematical reasons. The first table of content groups the 75 essays in ten chapters.

The four essays I selected are William Zinsser "The Transaction", Richard Howey "How to Write a Rotten Poem with Almost No Effort", Bruno Bettelheim "The Holocaust" and Susan Sontag "Beauty". They belong to the last group in the thematic contents which is titled "On Language and the Writing Process". Two works focus on language ("The Holocaust" and "Beauty"), and two on the process of writing ("The Transaction" and "How to Write a Rotten Poem..."). The essays of Sontag and Bettelheim can be found in the same chapter in the first table of contents (Chapter 4), while Howey's belongs to Chapter 3 and Zinsser's to Chapter 1.

As a supplementary reading I used the book How Writing Works by Francis A. Hubbard. His work allowed me to examine the principles along which an essay is built up. The author analyzes the accepted structure of a work, and how it can help both the reader and the writer to depart from it. He claims that "structure must be adapted to the needs of the audience" (Hubbard 52). It guides readers by giving them a shape, a plan in mind so that they could easily follow the text. It tells them what comes next and where they are (Hubbard 49).

Results and Discussion
Is it really important to write an appropriate introduction? This question came to my mind when I read the essays I selected.

According to Hubbard, a writer should look at structure "as a container to fill. A regular format saves time and effort because many decisions don't have to be remade" (125). Structure gives better coherence and easier access to the ideas and examples of the writer. Most of them consider it a necessary requirement as clear structure benefits readers (127).

But sticking to a settled structure (introduction-body-conclusion) tenaciously can make an essay dull. Sometimes flexibility is required.

The first two essays I compared (Zinsser "The Transaction" and Howey "How to Write a Rotten Poem...") concentrate on giving a definition of the writing process. Although they have the same theme and topic, they differ in many aspects.

Zinsser's essay shows us the differences two writers experience when one writes as a hobby and finds it enjoyable, the other writes as a job and finds it difficult. His essay is a narrative one. It shows the features more of a literary work than that of an essay. As an introduction (the first two paragraphs) he places the event in time, describes the circumstances, and the other character. He uses this method to give orientation to readers ("Five or six years ago a school in Connecticut..."). The body of the text makes the most of the contradiction between the two writers: one who writes as vocation, the other who does it as a hobby.

Howey's essay describes the easiest way anyone can create a poem to take part in literary work. In his essay I noticed that he did not stick to the traditional form of the opening paragraph. Rather, his introduction arouses interest by surprising or even astonishing readers: "So you want to write a poem. You've had a rotten day or an astounding thought...". He uses an informal style, words ("rotten, squalid love affair"), he talks to his reader as if it were a conversation. This style serves as a basis of changing into speaking ironically (almost sarcastically) of the way anybody can "write a rotten poem with almost no effort". The body of the text and the conclusion remain in the ironic tone. The sarcastic humor of the writing and the astonishing start help readers to decide: this work is worth reading on.

The essays written by Bettelheim ("The Holocaust") and Susan Sontag ("Beauty") deal with language. Both aim to define a concept: Bettelheim by focusing on it linguistically, Sontag philosophically and esthetically.

The first impression both writings give when the reader takes a look at them is that they consist of long paragraphs: between five and twenty lines each.

Partly in the same way as Howey, Bettelheim does not either apply the usual introductory paragraph. His prompting is direct: it gave me the impression of an in medias res start. Although the first three words say "To begin with", he immediately sets about explaining the origin of the word "holocaust".

The first paragraph (17 lines) sets the tone of the whole writing. As he is involved in the topic emotionally in spite of the essay's scientific and polished style, the reader can still feel and be aware of his indignation ("terrible events, powerful revulsion, unmasterable fate"). Another feature of his is the usage of long words ("connotations, circumlocution, intellectual, uniqueness").

Susan Sontag begins her essay by defining the features of beauty-what it meant for the Greeks, and how it has changed by the 20th century. I treated the first two paragraphs (17 lines) as the introduction. It gives a general view of beauty by helping readers associate it with a specific era. The opening paragraphs establish transition to the body of the text where Sontag writes about beauty from a concrete point of view: connecting this feature only to females, limiting its meaning only to the outside. She expresses her ideas point for point, starting from a general statement: "For the Greeks, beauty was a virtue", and arriving at a detailed description of the concept-what it means today for women.

Conclusion
I presented the different ways different writers fill the container given by a structure or the way they deviate from it. The four essays I used for my purpose showed me four different solutions of writing an introduction, of arousing readers' interest and keeping it alive for the rest of the text.

Readers differ in their purposes of reading as well as in their methods. We read differently. Writing for different people is hard work, as a writer cannot take into consideration every single desire. Tastes differ. One reader loves this essay, but cannot read the other. Hubbard claims that some kind of writing will work for almost anyone, if one can find out what it is (53). He also says that there are no certainties in writing , no guarantees, and no perfect or universal strategies (53).

Comparing four introductions from four so different people is also hard work. As Zinsser puts it in his essay: "There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps somebody to say what he wants to say is the right method for him (24).

All the four writers used the structure (introduction-body-conclusion), some of them in the usual way (Sontag and Zinsser) and some of them making it more flexible (Bettelheim and Howey) adapting it to their purpose.