"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it." - Ernest Hemingway
In this section, you will find
WRITING INTRODUCTIONS UWF Writing Lab Summer 1997
The introduction of a multi-paragraph essay is somewhat like the introductory "tease" in a television commercial: both hope you attract people's attention so that they will not turn away. Although advertising writers may rely on such standard visual devices as ravishing girls, virile athletes, appealing children, or breathtaking scenery, expository writers have none of these options; but they have others. By considering these other choices, you may find one that strikes your fancy if your own inspiration fails. Here are some possible attention-getting approaches.
Some students swear that graduate teaching assistants are inexperienced, ignorant, and uninteresting; others insist that they are enthusiastic, friendly, and inspiring.
That slightly older guy, garbed in jeans and sweatshirt, sometimes with a beard, often with a pipe, nearly always with a sack of books, who strides in late the first day of freshman class, is neither student nor professor but a peculiar species known as a graduate teaching assistant.
Begin with a negative statement of your topic, followed by a positive or direct statement. This technique is useful when you are taking a position that contradicts the prevailing opinion. It catches the reader off-guard by stating a widely held notion and the refuting it.
Graduate students are neither fish nor fowl, neither completely students nor teachers, neither really graduates nor assistants.
Beware of graduate teaching assistants.
Most of the two million freshmen entering colleges and universities this fall will be instructed by graduate teaching assistants.
A graduate teaching assistant is like a pilot on a new route: each is capable, but each is unfamiliar with the course.
This may be an adage, epigram, excerpt from a poem or other literary work, or any famous or familiar quote. Be sure that the quote is used appropriately; that is, don't begin with a quote simply for the sake of using it. Quotes may also be material from journal and periodicals.
"Although they are inexperienced, most graduate teaching assistants are generally instructors because they relate well to the students," states the authors of The Writing Commitment.
The recent debate in the freshman dormitory about graduate teaching assistants was almost as heated as the one at the United Nations about the Third World.
Having had seven graduate teaching assistants in my first two semesters at college, I feel well qualified to discuss their strengths and weaknesses.
Sometimes the question stimulates interest because it seems to push the reader on to find an answer. However, this method has been employed so frequently that many sophisticated readers resent it as condescending or trite. Therefore, be careful in selecting this technique since it represents a desperate gamble: if readers reply "Yes" to the question, you've got them; but it "No," you've lost them.
Do graduate teaching assistants make effective instructors?
This technique is especially helpful if you're addressing highly educated readers or if the subject lends itself to an interesting use of definition.
The dictionary definition of a graduate teaching assistant is "a graduate student with part-time complete or partial college teaching responsibilities."
Effective only when it relates to the subject being discussed and when it does not take up too much of the total length of the theme.
Now, here are some ways to turn readers off.
Although I don't know much about this subject, I thought I'd write a paper about it.
I started thinking about this paper after dinner and couldn't come up with an interesting subject, but I finally decided on this one.
The title of this paper, "Graduate Teaching Assistants," indicates that it is concerned with ...
Some graduate teaching assistants have so many good possibilities that I can't think of most of them, much less include them in this paper.
In this theme, I plan to discuss the effects of having good graduate teaching assistants.
They are effective because ...