Fishing for an Audience

 

Fishing for your dinner, you stand in the ice chilled water, motionless; spying a speckled trout, you focus all your energy and like lightening, you strike, snagging the helpless creature from the water only to have the fish slip from your bare hands and swim away.  A hook would be nice, but you don’t have one.

 

For a fisherman, a hook is important; it can catch the one that would otherwise swim away. For writers, a hook is equally important; it can set the tone of an essay, reel in your audience, and invite them to continue reading. As students of composition, understanding the importance of hooks is vital.

 

Ideally, a hook hastens your audience’s desire to read further and encourages them to ask, “What happens next?”

 

Your hook should be catchy, pardon the pun, and relevant.  A hook that strays from the theme of the essay is deceiving, and no one likes to be cheated.

 

Sometimes, a metaphor or simile that might be carried throughout your essay is a perfect opener. Occasionally, a straight forward approach works best. And often, questions and interesting facts do the job.

 

Regardless of the technique, a hook is something that should employ in your essay.

 

Here are hooks from some popular essays. Now it time for you to decide, could you have done it better?

 

“I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I suppose.”—Sherman Alexie’s “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me”

 

“Recently a white woman from Texas, who would quickly describe herself as a liberal, asked me about my hometown.”—Maya Angelou’s “What’s Your Name, Girl?”

 

“This is my nightmare: My daughter comes home with a guy and says, ‘Dad, we’re getting married.’”—James McBride’s “Hip Hop Nation”

 

“After smiling brilliantly for nearly four decades, I now find myself trying to quit.”—Amy Cunningham’s “Why Women Smile”

 

“I am not a scholar of English or literature.”—Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue”

 

“I was saved from sin when I was going on thirteen.”—Langston Hughes’s “Salvation”

 

“In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.”—George Orwell “Shooting an Elephant”