How to Write the Perfect Essay Introduction Paragraph Every Time

With an essay about John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” as a guide!

Person prepares to write an essay (source: Pixabay).

No matter what your major or minor, chances are you need to take English 101/102 (or your school’s equivalent) in your first year.

Each time you have a paper due, your instructor will be reading stacks of them. Some of your peers will come from an AP background; some will have never read the book.

Here’s how to write a perfect paper that will make your essay stand out from the get-go.

source: author

Everyone read the same piece and everyone is responding to the same prompt. Still — you need to explicitly state the title of the work and its author in your first sentence. It shouldn’t read like a Wikipedia article: instead, incorporate these important facts into a sentence that directs the flow of your essay as a whole.

Spot the difference:

Wikipedia: “Ode to a Nightingale” is a poem by John Keats written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London or, according to Keats’ friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats’ house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead.

Your essay: In his 1819 poem “Ode to a Nightingale,” John Keats creates a persona who longs to identify with what he calls the “immortal Bird” and fly away from his life of pain (Keats, line 61).

Don’t provide a backstory for the author or the poem. Simply respond to the prompt.

source: author

The middle of an introduction paragraph can be the hardest part. While you build up to your thesis, it’s a good idea to explain how you got to it in the first place.

This is a great time to make claims about the piece that you know to be true, or, even better, are postulating to be true based off of in-text evidence. In this example, my essay is about the overall message of the poem, so the middle of my introduction paragraph makes claims about what the speaker wants and juxtaposes them against his choice of words (also called “diction”).

Your essay: The speaker wants to escape into the kind of immortality that the bird experiences — the immortality of poetry — rather than stay in his own world of death and disease. Yet if he wants to escape death, why would he want to “leave the world unseen” and claim to be “half in love with easeful Death” (19, 52)? Here, it is important to note that the speaker wants to identify with the nightingale but is unable to, because his other-worldly longing cannot and should not be fulfilled. While human life is ephemeral, creative expression is immortal.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions in your essay! If you identify questions and pose them as such, you put yourself in a great spot to answer them yourself. This shows your instructor your thought process and proves that you can think about the text from multiple angles.

source: author

This is the most important part of your introductory paragraph because it sets the expectations for the rest of your essay. In an essay for an English class, you’ll likely need to write about a theme of the piece and why it matters or how that theme is presented in the piece overall.

So long as you have identified the three prongs of your thesis, you’ll be able to generate enough content to reach the required page count.

Your essay: Keats’ intensifying tone is revealed through the poem’s meter, reliable rhyme scheme, and imagery, all of which contribute to his message that human life is caught between the desire for immortality and the reality of disease and death.

Note: the order of your prongs (meter, rhyme scheme, imagery) should exactly match the order in which you talk about them later. Should you decide to re-organize your paragraphs when the essay is finished, go back to your introduction and re-organize your thesis, as well.

Extra tips

• Watch your tone. Now isn’t the time to try to stand out by being colloquial (Sooo in this essay I’m gonna talk about ___. I hope you like it, Prof Sam!) or, on the flip side, verbose (In this ode by the magnificent poet of yore, Keats, that with whom we shall depart…). Keep it professional by writing in the third person and not addressing your audience directly.
• Don’t oversell. It’s fine to use big words, but stick to the ones that you know already — your professor will be able to tell if you’ve scoured a thesaurus to “sound smart.”
• Cite your sources! Make sure to stick to the style guide your teacher asked for. PurdueOwl is an excellent resource with pertinent information for myriad citation styles.
  (Notice how in the above example, I only cite Keats as the author in the first in-text citation at the end of my sentence. Every time I cite a different line of the poem, I do so without mentioning Keats again — this is because in MLA format, if you cite multiple things from the same source in a row, your reader infers that every citation comes from the same text as the first.)
• Write in the present tense. Even if the piece you’re writing about is old and finished and its author is dead, treat all texts as living documents. That means that Keats creates a persona. It may feel odd at first, but once you get used to it, it’ll be easy to write in the present tense.

You’ve got this.

Good luck!