Confession from a college sophomore with a modest blog: through all of freshman year, essays took me five hours, and three of those went to the first paragraph. I would type an opening sentence, judge it, delete it, and repeat until self-loathing forced out a paragraph that I then defended like a border, refusing to change it no matter where the essay went afterward. My essays read like the work of two people who had never met: a nervous greeter, and whoever wrote the parts with ideas.
A TA's margin comment sent me looking for help: "Your intro promises an essay you did not write." Cruel, accurate. The search led me to this guide to essay introductions, and one piece of its advice repaid the whole read: draft the introduction last, or treat any early version as scaffolding you will demolish. An introduction is a promise about contents. Making promises about an essay that does not exist yet is how you end up keeping the wrong ones.
The guide breaks the intro into jobs, hook the reader honestly, frame the question, state the claim, preview the road, and shows openings that do each job. It also lines up the fake versions: the quote from a famous person, the dawn-of-time opener, the dictionary definition I am ashamed to say I used twice.
New process: I write the body first, find out what I argued, then write the intro as an accurate trailer. Essay time dropped from five hours to three. The greeter and the thinker finally met, and my last paper came back with a comment I screenshotted: "Intro delivers." Two words from a TA. On my blog, that counts as a rave review.
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