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Come spend an afternoon learning how to harness your readers—and keep their attention through the end. This class surveys a variety of strategies for starting a story, as well as techniques for carrying the energy forward well beyond your opening lines.
- Begin at a pivotal moment. We were people who had Mediterranean ancestors, dark hair, dark eyes, tan skin, and everyone else in White Pine looked very Scandinavian; we became the town’s diversity—before diversity was a good thing.
- Add an unusual situation. I coped by being careful and good and funny which was like an invisibility cloak in high school but as much as I tried to blend in, my older brother Ray stood out in the most threatening way possible for a good girl and that was as a bad boy.
- Add intriguing characters. My father was and is best described as an intense, idealist with a steel girder of a work ethic and a charm that wears thin under the gun of his laser focused attentions.
- Conflict. Outside the restaurant, just before swinging the door wide and walking inside my Dad would stop us and say, “Now remember everybody, this is for Mom.
Discover how to support your child’s growth as a young reader and writer — with our Reading 101 for Families guide, bilingual parent tips, ideas for building your child’s knowledge of the world, Q&A with experts, and guidance on connecting with your child’s school. Visit the Literacy at Home Overview
- What Is A Hook?
- How to Write A Hook: The 10 Types
- What Is A Hook For An Essay?
- Marketing Hooks
- Hook Your Readers
In rhetoric, a “hook” refers to the catchy first line of any written or orally delivered piece. Because it’s not strictly limited to writing, this includes spoken pieces like speeches, movies, plays, and even songs. When it comes to songs or movies, the hook is not dependent only on your words. For songwriting, an effective hook usually depends mor...
Writing a compelling hook takes skill. But you can use any of the following ways of writing a hook to get you started:
In an essay, the hook falls in the introduction paragraph. To review, the parts of an essay include: 1. Introduction Paragraph(s): This includes your hook, the background information, and your thesis statement. 2. Body Paragraphs:Each body paragraph starts with your topic sentence. Then you elaborate using detail sentences, and wrap up the paragrap...
Hooks aren’t just for essays: they’re also important to marketing, and can make or break your campaign. When it comes to marketing, you might use creative hooks in your blog post headlines, ad copy, company slogan, or even in your book’s subtitle. These hooks are usually short, as modern consumers have short attention spans, and most advertisers ha...
Try these different types of hooks and see which one works best for your essay. To develop your writing skills further, challenge yourself to use different types each time you sit down and write, instead of always reaching for your favorite type. Which type of hook is your favorite? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
- Know Your Audience. One of the key steps to take before you can effectively ‘hook’ your reader into your narrative is to determine who this reader is.
- Know The Purpose of Your Narrative. What makes a narrative gripping are the profound or innovative messages it seeks to convey to the reader. Therefore, it’s helpful to incorporate an essence of your narrative’s message within the ‘hook’.
- Adopt a strong character voice. Considerations of character voice are necessary to writing a good hook. Characters are one of the central components of narratives and they’re the ones the readers come to care about.
- Use unusual imagery. Another feature of an effective hook is its ability to evoke imagery so strange or so beautiful to the tongue that it simply can’t escape the reader’s attention.
Jul 7, 2023 · Use a strong opening line: Hooking your reader with your opening line will help pull them into your narrative. It doesn’t have to be long: One of the most poignant opening lines of all time, from The Stranger by Albert Camus, simply states, “Mother died today.”
Jun 22, 2021 · Dread Factor. Keep narrative voice compelling. Now, here is the essay separated by each element so you can see how to incorporate into your own story: A Summer Place by Ann Garvin. When my older brother Ray put Jamie Lockhart into a coma it changed my life but it took me forty-five years to figure out how.
