An eighth grader asked me for help writing a school-assigned essay. Her teacher had given the class a fill-in-the-blanks organizer. It was incredibly detailed. In the introduction area was a blank with the word “hook,” and below it another blank with the word “thesis.” For each of the two body paragraph areas were the words “citation, “explanation,” “citation,” and “explanation.” At the end was the word “conclusion.”
I read the thesis the student had chosen which sounded okay. Then I read the hook. It was an unrelated quotation. I pointed out to the student that the hook seemed to have nothing to do with the thesis. “Huh?” she responded, and then explained at length how the hook was related to the thesis. She looked at me expectantly.
“I don’t buy it,” I said.
I asked her what she had written first, the hook quotation or the thesis. “The hook,” she said.
Of course. This student was making three mistakes that I see over and over in student essays.
First, she did not write the thesis first. In an essay, the most important sentence is the thesis. That is the first sentence to write. Every other sentence needs to support the ideas in that thesis sentence. If you don’t know what ideas are in the thesis, how can you write about them?
Second, she wrote the hook first, thinking (as her teachers may have told her) that the hook is where the essay begins. The hook is where the reader begins reading an essay. But it is not where the writer begins writing an essay. A good essay is thought though and written out of order. The proper sequence in which to write an essay (after you have organized it) is
- Thesis, first;
- body paragraph topic sentences, second;
- detail sentences in the body paragraphs, third. These sentences back up the body paragraph topic sentences which in turn back up the thesis;
- introduction, fourth, including the hook if there is one; and
- conclusion, last.
The third mistake my student made was perhaps the most serious of all: she didn’t recognize that her chosen hook did not introduce the ideas of her thesis. She thought that her hook was so clever (and it was) that it didn’t matter if it was related to the ideas of her thesis. It does matter.
Over and over, I work with students who focus on the structure of an essay rather than the substance of the essay. Their essays are like Academy Award winning actresses in gorgeous gowns, sparkling jewelry, and splendid coifs whose speeches are either hollow or off-topic.
I asked my student to rewrite her hook. She did because she wants a good grade, and I’m a teacher, so I probably know what I am advising her. But I wonder if she understands that her original hook was irrelevant to the main idea of her essay.
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