ENG 302 - Business Writing - Summary
Arizona State University
Introduction to Crafting Clear and Professional Business Documents
Elia Kazan, brilliant director of stage and screen as well as a late-blooming novelist, told
me that audiences give a film seven minutes. If the viewer is not intrigued by character
or incident within that time, the film and its viewer are at odds. The viewer came for an
experience. The film is disappointing him.
Today’s impatient readers give a novelist fewer than seven minutes. Some years ago I
was involved in an informal study of the behavior of lunch-hour browsers in mid-
Manhattan bookstores. In the fiction section, the most common pattern was for the
browser to read the front flap of the book’s jacket and then go to page one. No browser
went beyond page three before either taking the book to the cashier or putting the
book down and picking up another to sample.
Thereafter, whenever an author told me that his novel really got going on page ten or
twenty or thirty, I had to pass on the news that his book in all likelihood was doomed
unless he could revise it so that the first three pages aroused the reader’s interest
enough to quarantine him from distraction for the several hours the book demanded
from him.
Readers have not grown more patient since that bit of research was conducted. Today,
first sentences and first paragraphs of any writing are increasingly important for
arousing the restless reader.
Arousal is nature’s stimulus for the propagation of the human race. The unaroused male
of the species is as useless for that purpose as a worm. Arousal can happen sooner or
later, but it must happen.
Similarly arousal is an author’s stimulus for the reader. Without early arousal, the
reader does not yet trust that he will enjoy the experience that the writer has prepared.
The ideal goals of an opening paragraph are:
1. To excite the reader’s curiosity, preferably about a character or a relationship.
2. To introduce a setting.
3. To lend resonance to the story.
Long before I edited a couple of Budd Schulberg’s books, he published his first novel,
What Makes Sammy Run?, a book whose opening I like to quote from. Sammy was a
huge bestseller in 1941. This is the way it starts:
The first time I saw him he couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old, a little
ferret of a kid, sharp and quick. Sammy Glick. Used to run copy for me. Always ran.
Always looked thirsty.
To prove that writers know what works even if they don’t take advantage of their
knowledge in their own writing, I ask my students to pick out the most important word
in Schulberg’s opening. See if you can’t find it in the paragraph just quoted.
Most writers quickly come up with the correct answer: “ferret.” It characterizes sixteen-
year-old Sammy in a flash.
Next I ask for the second most important word in that paragraph. See if you can’t
detect it.
That may take a bit more time, but after a moment’s thought a majority will zero in on
“thirsty,” an original way of saying Sammy was hungry, meaning ambitious.
The words “always ran” convey quickly that Sammy is a hustler.
That opening is an inspiring example of quick characterization and especially of a way
to arouse the reader’s interest because in a few words we sense a conflict brewing. The
narrator knows Sammy is overly ambitious. The kid wants what? Everything!
Therein lies a clue. As readers, we are immediately interested in a character who wants
something badly.
The fact that the narrator is Sammy’s boss also piques the reader’s curiosity. Will the
narrator continue to put up with Sammy’s drive? Will Sammy get fired? Will Sammy
succeed, and if so at what and how will he do it? The story is off and running in the first
paragraph. We want to know what will happen.
At the time that Schulberg wrote What Makes Sammy Run? he wasn’t an old master. He
was a young first novelist. If one understands the principles of intriguing the reader,
one doesn’t need decades of experience.
James T. Farrell, a friend who achieved fame for his novel Studs Lonigan, once gave me
a copy of a collection of his short stories called French Girls Are Vicious, in which the
title story contains an interesting example for writers. The narrator begins, “I don’t like
French girls. Perhaps it’s because of my Puritan upbringing ...”
We assume the speaker is a man. At the beginning of the second paragraph a surprise
is waiting for us. The narrator is a woman! Our curiosity is aroused when a surprise
unsettles our expectation.
It is astonishing how much the first words of a novel or story affect editors, reviewers,
and readers. They are the trigger of curiosity, what writers have long called the
“narrative hook.” In addition, the early words suggest the kind of book one is reading.
Thornton Wilder, my early mentor in playwriting, also wrote novels, the most famous of
which, The Bridge of San Luis Key, starts this way:
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and
precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
It’s precise as to date and time and the number of people. But the key to arousing our
interest is in the words “finest bridge.” Bridges deteriorate. Many are hazardous. But
this bridge that suddenly hurtled five people to their death was “the finest.” We want to
know what happened, and why.
Here’s another:
Yank Lucas fell asleep late one night and left the gas burning on the kitchen range.
We want to know more. That’s the opening of John O’Hara’s 1967 novel, The
Instrument.
James Baldwin began his short story “Going to Meet the Man” with this unembellished
way of interesting the reader:
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
Here’s a quieter—yet intriguing—opening sentence by one of the century’s grand
masters, Graham Greene, from an early (1935) novel, England Made Me.
She might have been waiting for her lover.
Maxine Hong Kingston kindled the reader’s interest in The Woman Warrior with the kind
of hook that almost always works:
“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.”
See how much Irwin Shaw accomplished in the first sentence of his story “The Eighty-
Yard Run”:
The pass was high and wide and he jumped for it, feeling it slap flatly against his hands,
as he shook his hips to throw off the halfback who was diving at him.
Anthony Burgess, in both his fiction and nonfiction, enjoyed shocking the reader into
attention. The following attention-getter is the opening of his twenty-second novel,
Earthly Powers:
It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite
when Ali announced the archbishop had come to see me.
That first sentence tells us the narrator is old, that he is in bed with someone of the
same sex, that this is a regular event in his life, and the event this day is being
interrupted by a visit from an archbishop! That certainly piques the reader’s curiosity
about what kind of confrontation is about to happen.
Another example:
On the day he lost his right foot, Walter Van Brunt had been haunted, however
haphazardly, by ghosts of the past.
Losing a foot is not an everyday occurrence. From the first sentence we know we are
going to witness an important day in the life of Walter Van Brunt. Moreover, Van Brunt
is haunted by “ghosts of the past.” Who or what are they? The interjection—“however
haphazardly”—conveys a touch of literary flavor. Would a commercial action-adventure
author ever say “however haphazardly”?
That’s a lot to get from a first sentence. It’s from a 1987 novel, World’s End, by T.
Coraghessan Boyle, who has been called “one of the most gifted writers of his
generation.”
Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, most often uses characterization to
attract a reader’s attention. Here are the opening sentences of four of his novels:
When it came to concealing his troubles, Tommy Wilhelm was not less capable than the
next fellow.
What made me take this trip to Africa?
If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.
Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Artur Sammler
with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and
suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers.
In order, the openings are from Bellow’s first novel, Seize the Day; Henderson the Rain
King, his most celebrated novel; Herzog; and Mr. Sammler’s Planet. Note that all of
Bellow’s beginnings except Henderson seize the attention of the reader by
characterization, which we get soon enough.
All right, you say, these are well-known writers, prize-winning writers, what about
writers like me? Fair enough. Here are some first sentences from work by students of
mine who have yet to publish:
I wanted to strangle mother but I’d have to touch her to do it.
That’s by Loretta Hudson. The narrator wants to perform an act that is taboo and
punishable, but what causes the reaction of the reader is the countervailing force, the
repugnance at having to touch the person you want to strangle. I have heard audiences
gasp when that opening sentence is read to them.
The same student started a story with an entirely different hook in the first sentence:
It would have been nice if the stork had dropped me down the right chimney.
That visual opening presents the narrator’s problem—the wrong parents!—in an
attention-grabbing way. How abstract the beginning would have sounded had the
author started, “I was born to the wrong parents.”
Here’s one by another beginner:
A telephone ringing in the middle of the night is not a welcome sound.
What should be clear by now is that writers with differing skills and experiences have all
tried to engage the reader’s curiosity at the outset. There are questions you can ask
yourself about your own first sentence:
Does it convey an interesting personality or an action that we want to know
more about?
Can you make your first sentence more intriguing by introducing something
unusual, something shocking perhaps, or something that will surprise the
reader?
Your entire story or novel may depend on that first sentence arresting the reader’s
attention. A terrific sentence on page two won’t help if the reader never gets there.
Is it absolutely essential for the first sentence to hook the reader? The first sentence of
the next example is a simple statement of the narrator’s name. The rest of the
paragraph appears on the surface to be conventional, but is it? It’s from the title story
of John Cheever’s short story collection The Housebreaker of Shady Hill1
My name is Johnny Hake. I’m thirty-six years old, stand five feet eleven in my socks,
weigh one hundred and forty-two pounds stripped, and am, so to speak, naked at the
moment and talking into the dark. I was conceived in the Hotel St. Regis, born in the
Presbyterian Hospital, raised on Sutton Place, christened and confirmed in St.
Bartholomew’s, and I drilled with the Knickerbocker Greys, played football and baseball
in Central Park, learned to chin myself on the framework of East Side apartment-house
canopies, and met my wife (Christina Lewis) at one of those big cotillions at the
Waldorf. I served four years in the Navy, have four kids now, and live in a banlieue
called Shady Hill. We have a nice house with a garden and a place outside for cooking
meat, and on summer nights, sitting there with the kids and looking into the front of
Christina’s dress as she bends over to salt the steaks, or just gazing at the lights in
Heaven, I am thrilled by more hardy and dangerous pursuits, and I guess this is what is
meant by the pain and sweetness of life.
You can’t be more direct than that. There’s Johnny Hake encapsulating his life for the
reader. Cheever, however, is a sly craftsman. In the first sentence his character lets
drop that he is “naked at the moment and talking into the dark.” Not the kind of thing
you’d put into a résumé. A few more sentences and he’s “looking into the front of
Christina’s dress as she bends over to salt the steaks.” That’s in the middle of a
sentence, seemingly a throwaway, but in fact a hook for the reader. A craftsman like
Cheever will season even the most conventional beginning with just enough that is
unconventional to rouse the reader’s curiosity.
John Fowles is one of the more accomplished novelists of this century. His career began
in 1963 with the publication of a relatively simple novel called The Collector. If you
haven’t read it, I urge you to. Let’s look at how he starts the book:
When she was home from her boarding school I used to see her almost every day
sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annex. She and her
younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I
didn’t like.
The end of the second sentence is the first omen of what proves to be an exceptionally
suspenseful book. Let’s see how the first paragraph continues:
When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the window and used to
look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see her. In the evening I
marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and then when I knew her name with
M. I saw her several times outside too. I stood right behind her once in a queue at the
public library down Crossfield Street. She didn’t look once at me, but I watched the back
of her head and her hair in a long pigtail. It was very pale, silky, like Burnet cocoons. All
in one pigtail coming down almost to her waist, sometimes
1 “The Housebreaker on Shady Hill” has always held a special interest for me because
I’ve lived in that house for more than thirty years. I hasten to add we are not the people
in that house. The house on Shady Hill is not the house Johnny Hake lives in. It is the
house he steals from in the story.
in front, sometimes at the back. Sometimes she wore it up. Only once, before she came
to be my guest here, did I have the privilege to see her with it loose and it took my
breath away it was so beautiful, like a mermaid.
That first long paragraph introduces the two main characters, the narrator and his
victim. Note the amount of concrete detail. I will reproduce that paragraph, highlighting
the ominous phrases.
When she was home from her boarding school I used to see her almost every day
sometimes, because their house was right opposite the Town Hall Annex. She and her
younger sister used to go in and out a lot, often with young men, which of course I
didn’t like. When I had a free moment from the files and ledgers I stood by the
window and used to look down over the road over the frosting and sometimes I’d see
her. In the evening I marked it in my observations diary, at first with X, and
then when I knew her name with M. I saw her several times outside too. I stood
right behind once in a queue at the public library down Crossfield Street. She didn’t look
once at me, but I watched the back of her head and her hair in a long pigtail. It was
very pale, silky, like Burnet cocoons. All in one pigtail coming down almost to her waist,
sometimes in front, sometimes at the back. Sometimes she wore it up. Only once,
before she came to be my guest here, did I have the privilege to see her with it
loose and it took my breath away it was so beautiful, like a mermaid.
As readers, what do we take away from that first paragraph?
The narrator didn’t like “M” seeing other young men, though she didn’t even
know him!
He kept an “observations diary.” He found out her name.
Once he stood right behind her. She didn’t notice him, but he was studying her
hair as if he were preparing to become her lover.
And “she came to be my guest”? What she becomes is his prisoner!
An even more sly craftsman is Vladimir Nabokov. Here’s the beginning of his most
famous novel:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue
taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
The second paragraph continues:
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in
slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she
was always Lolita.
That’s ostensibly the first paragraph of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which created a
sensation when it was published in 1955. “Ostensibly” because we find there’s a
Foreword in front of the novel signed by one John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. Nabokov liked to have
fun with his audience, and so in front of the book proper, he planted a mock Foreword
supposedly written by a scholar. That Foreword is as intriguing as the beginning of the
actual book. It describes the book as a confession, tells us the book’s author died in
prison, uses concrete specifics—a diagnosis, a date, a lawyer’s name—and lets drop
that the writer of the foreword was himself awarded a prize for a modest work in which
“certain morbid states and perversions” were discussed. We might say that Nabokov
began Lolita twice, and both beginnings, in different ways, were designed to excite the
interest of the reader.
The opening paragraphs of Lolita proper—the announcing of the sounds of her name
and the revelation that the protagonist is having an affair with a schoolgirl—pulls the
reader in two ways: Scandalous subject matter and the immediate sense that here is a
writer who plays with language artfully.
I thought it might be useful to follow a writer’s thoughts as he developed a first
paragraph. I am not psychic. The experience I tapped is my own. The lawyer George
Thomassy appeared in my novels The Magician, The Childkeeper, and Other People.
When it came time for him to appear again in The Touch of Treason, I wanted to start
with Thomassy looking over a courtroom where he was to try a major case. My
objectives for that beginning were the three that I suggested earlier:
To lend resonance to the story.
To convey Thomassy’s personality to new readers and reintroduce him to those
who’d encountered him before.
To establish a courtroom setting.
In the end you died. There could be a courtroom like this, Thomassy thought; all the
good wood bleached white, the judge deaf to objections because He owned the place.
The law was His, the advocacy system finished.
If that’s what it was going to be like, George Thomassy wanted to live forever, because
here on earth, God willing or not, you could fight back.
The courtroom Thomassy is viewing is in his mind. He is imagining the “courtroom” of
judgment day. The reader knows the judge is He, and He “owned the place. The law
was His.” It is apparent that Thomassy resents the authority of judges. Thomassy wants
an arena where he can fight back. His most characteristic trait is to try to win under
every circumstance, yet to continue to do so would be impossible; he would have to live
forever.
That’s a lot to cram into a few lines. I hoped the essence of my intent would come
across, and that the reader, at minimum, would be anticipating the courtroom drama to
come.
What can a newcomer do in a first paragraph? A lot. The following is the first paragraph
of a novel by a student in my advanced fiction seminar who is writing about a painter:
Shoshana stormed through the silent apartment. Mason, you son of a bitch! Where are
you? Instinct told her: Mason had fled. You gutless coward, she raged. Returning to her
studio, Shoshana stabbed the brush she carried into ajar of turpentine. Just try to get in
one hour’s ego-affirming work of one’s own. No way!
The writer, Anne Mudgett, is using action to characterize. She is also setting up conflict
between the narrator and Mason, and involving the reader in Shoshana’s emotional
state.
We saw how James T. Farrell used surprise. In the example that follows, surprise is used
by a student, Steve Talsky, whose work is yet to be published:
I am the way, the answer and the light, through me all things are possible.
He had written this once as a joke on the headboard of his bed.
The reader gets an impression of a character who is unusual and about whom one
wants to know more. Not least, one has the sense that this author’s work has
resonance.
The value of a well-written opening is that it makes the reader ready to give himself to
the writer’s imagined people for the duration.
It should be clear by now that the unusual is a factor in arousing the reader’s interest.
And so is action and conflict. So many writers fight an uphill battle trying to interest
their readers in matters that have no inherent conflict. The worst possible way to start a
story is with something like “They were a wonderful couple. He loved her and she loved
him. They never argued.”
The result is instant boredom. Boredom is the greatest enemy of both reader and
writer. Do we gaze with wonder at the nice, average, normal-looking people we pass in
the street? Our attention is arrested by the seven-footer and the midget, the oldster
with the mechanical waddle, the child who bounces as she walks. Recall how people
react to the sound of metal crunching metal, announcing an accident. They hasten to
see what happened. Highways get choked when drivers slow down to gawk at the
remains of an collision. To the student of literature it should come as no surprise that
news programs concentrate on bad news first, on events filled with conflict.
Beginning a book with an intriguing opening is the easy way to capture the reader.
There are, however, more leisurely ways to seduce the reader, through omens.
You have heard people say, “I’ve got a feeling something is going to happen.” How is
that done? In The Magician, the opening pages convey the town of Ossining at the end
of a month of intermittent snowfall. Boys in twos and threes with shovels are clearing
neighbors’ sidewalks. The third sentence has a slight omen:
An occasional older man, impoverished or proud, could be seen daring death with a
shovel in hand, clearing steps so that one could get in and out of the house, or using a
small snowblower on a driveway in the hope of getting his wife to the supermarket and
back before the next snow fell.
“Daring death” is an omen. And the rhythm of the words at the end of the sentence is
designed to strengthen the ominous feeling in “the next snow fell.”
The second paragraph also ends with the thump-thump-thump of monosyllabic words:
It seemed impossible that spring might come, and that these humped gray masses
would eventually vanish as water into the heel-hard ground.
I then lift the reader’s spirit with a sight of “huge evergreens dusted with snow, and
above them the bare webs of leafless silver maples reflecting sunlight.” We see young
children enjoying the snow. During a brief tour, we find out we are in the richest county
of the United States, but the center of the village of Ossining has numerous empty
storefronts. Nearby homes have been fled from. And another omen central to the book
looms:
The biggest drain on taxes was, of course, the schools, in which violence was not
unknown.
And soon another:
It was not an unusual town in a country on the decline after only two centuries.
In the next paragraph—still on page two—we find out that the most famous site in that
village is Sing Sing prison, known throughout the world. And we, innocently it seems,
then find ourselves watching the protagonist, a young man named Ed Japhet, practicing
magic tricks in front of a large mirror in his parents’ bedroom. Of course I could have
started with that scene, but I preferred the gentle buildup of omens that something is
wrong in the village where the action takes place, in the country, perhaps in the world.
The reader’s apprehension has been raised. Something is going to happen. And it does.
Sometimes a single omen can do the work of several if it starts the engine of the novel.
A novel is like a car—it won’t go anywhere until you turn on the engine. The “engine” of
both fiction and nonfiction is the point at which the reader makes the decision not to
put the book down. The engine should start in the first three pages, the closer to the
top of page one the better.
Josiah Bunting, novelist and college president, had a penchant for finding the place
where the engine turned on in other people’s books. He read a novel of mine called The
Childkeeper in manuscript and immediately pointed to the place where the engine
started. It’s here as an example of how even a slight omen can encourage the reader to
keep reading.
In the first two pages we learn that Roger Maxwell, a banker content with wife and
children, has just received a promotion that enables him to buy a new house for his
family. Friends put him on to the best real estate agent in the vicinity of Chappaqua
and Pleasantville, a man named Stickney.
On the phone, Stickney asks a few questions. Note how innocuous they seem:
“Children?” asked Stickney.
“Four,” said Roger. “One’s away at college, but we’ve got to keep a room for him.”
“Guests?”
“Sometimes. Especially the children. They like to have their friends sleep over.”
And so it goes for a few more lines, while Stickney flips through his cards listing houses
that might be suitable. Then he says:
“Could you come up Sunday, say at two?” “Of course.”
“You’ll bring the children?” “Yes.”
Stickney was pleased. Children were part of his strategy.
That last sentence, according to Josiah Bunting, was when the engine turned on. As it
happens, we soon learn that Stickney intends to sell Maxwell a house that’s a haven for
children. It has a huge two-story room with bunk beds made of canoes and a forest of
stuffed animals. The novel, published in 1975, long before child abuse became a front-
burner topic, was about its opposite, parent abuse. We see evidence of that in the most
ordinary context, bit by bit, until the story explodes.
The only hint of the theme is in the epigraph that appears before page one. Epigraphs,
please note, can be useful omens. I turned a saying of Oscar Wilde’s on its head:
Parents begin by loving their children; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes
they forgive them.
It is a useful exercise for writers to spend time in their libraries at home or in public
libraries, looking at the first few pages of the books that have pleased them most in
order to find the exact place where the engine turns on, where the reader will not want
to put the book down.
There are many ways to arouse the reader’s interest at the start of a story or novel. A
character can want something important, want it badly, and want it now. Or a likable
character can be threatened. The reader who savors language can be aroused by the
author’s language, but that arousal won’t last unless the reader also becomes involved
in the life of a character who is quickly more interesting than most of the people who
surround us in life.
If your aim is publication, your best bet is to start with a scene that the reader can see.
Where do you start that scene? As close to its climax as is feasible if your aim is to
involve the reader quickly.
Nonfiction
At the beginning of a piece of nonfiction, the goal of the writer is the same as that of a
writer of fiction: to spark the reader’s interest sufficiently to engage him in reading the
rest. The principle applies to both transient and durable nonfiction.
Most writing for newspapers, for instance, is by its nature transient, usually written one
day, read the next, and no longer available thereafter. Most writers of books, essays,
and similar work hope that what they write will endure. These categories overlap. Much
that appears in hardcovers isn’t durable. And some writing for transient media has
remained as part of the culture that is passed from generation to generation.
Though the work I have guided has been mainly durable in its intent, journalists and
others have persuaded me of their eagerness to make their transient copy livelier,
stronger, and more enjoyable. The once “good, gray” New York Times is no longer gray
but colorful.
An easy way to interest the reader at the outset is by the use of surprise. Here are two
examples from the Times by Stephen Manes and Keith Brasher respectively:
When it comes to shopping for a computer, the most important peripheral runs at 98.6
degrees Fahrenheit and is known as a friend.
Here on a stony meadow in West Texas at the end of 10 miles of unpaved road through
mesquite- covered, coyote-infested shrub land, several hundred bearers of a strategic
commodity of the United States of America are gathered.
They are goats.
The trend toward such openings is resisted by some who think that lively writing is
somehow impure. For them I have an image that I convey to my classes. Imagine a
continuous line, with Life at one end, Death at the other.
Life---------------------------------------------------Boredom Death
On that line boredom—a loss of experience—belongs close to death. Successful writing
immerses the reader in heightened experience—emotional, intellectual, or both—more
rewarding than the life around him. Dull writing doesn’t provide pleasure. And whatever
information and insight it contains will be available only to those who are prepared to
tolerate the task of mining dull prose.
For purists I would point out that much academic writing is counter-educational because
its dullness insulates its information from nearly everybody. Geoffrey Cotterell is
credited with saying, “In America only the successful writer is important, in France all
writers are important, in England no writer is important, in Australia you have to explain
what a writer is.” As this extravagant exaggeration entertains, it manages to make its
point much better than a straight-faced dissertation on the same subject would.
If readers could talk back to writers (they sometimes do by not reading their work) they
might say, “Would you knowingly go to a physician who was weak in his craft? Would
you attend a badly conducted concert just because it was available? Would you bring
your car for a tune-up to a mechanic who thought fine-tuning was a waste of his time?”
The reader trusts the writer to do his best. If he does his second-best, he shouldn’t be
surprised if his reader finds another writer to read.
During most of the thirty-six years in which I was a publisher of books, I had the
responsibility of seeing a hundred new titles reach the public each year. The great
majority were nonfiction; a few became standard works. There is no reason why
nonfiction—including journalism—cannot be as interesting and enjoyable as fiction.
Information sticks best when it is crafted to touch the reader’s emotions. The journalist
or biographer or historian need not also be a novelist to use the devices of fiction to
have his work provide a more intense experience for his readers.
When the journalist crams who, what, when, where, and why into the first paragraph,
how can he hold the reader’s attention for the whole of what he has written? Naked
facts are frequently not enough to invite a reader’s attention to the rest of the story. It
is their context—the writing, the container of the information—that illuminates facts for
the reader and gives them significant meaning. Writers of nonfiction have the right—
perhaps even the responsibility—to access the wonders of the writer’s craft to make
their work interesting and enjoyable.
It was once thought that responsible journalism in reporting the news required
adherence to dry fact and that only columnists and feature writers could allow color,
metaphor, and even exaggeration for effect into their writings. As an example of how
untrue that is of today’s journalism, I chose the following lead front-page story from the
New York Times quite arbitrarily on a day when I was addressing this subject in public.
Needless to say, there are worthy and interesting newspapers in quite a few cities from
which examples could have been chosen. Here is the first paragraph under the byline of
Calvin Sims:
An 87-year-old water main ruptured outside of Grand Central Terminal just before the
morning rush hour yesterday, unleashing a deluge that ruined a newly renovated
subway station and plunged
commuters into a snarl of flooded subway lines and pulverized asphalt. The 20-inch
main, which runs east and west along 42d Street between Park and Lexington Avenue,
broke at about 5:45 A.M. Water surged upward, heaving 42d Street into a small
mountain range, then cascaded down staircases and ventilation grates like so many
waterfalls, flooding the subway tracks below. The repair process was delayed for hours
because the city’s Environmental Protection Department misidentified the site of the
rupture and mistakenly shut off the wrong main.
Note the colorful exaggeration that strays from strict fact. The street asphalt was not
literally crushed into powder (“pulverized”) but broken into slabs and pieces. And 42d
Street did not literally become “a small mountain range,” which my dictionary identifies
as “a mass of land that rises to a great height, especially of over one thousand feet.”
The reporter’s use of exaggeration and metaphor apparently caused no qualms among
his editors. Those opening sentences were meant to tempt the reader to read on.
On the same front page quoted above, there was a related story under a three-column
headline plus a subhead:
A Day That New York Shoulda Stood In Bed.
EXPRESSWAYS STALL, SUBWAYS STUMBLE AND BUSES STAGGER
That headline and subhead serve as the beginning, hooking the reader. As for the
subhead, expressways don’t stall, cars do; subways cannot stumble, nor can buses
stagger. But all that colorful inaccuracy gets the idea across with a touch of humor and
pulls the reader into a story in which buses “limped up and down avenues” and “Taxis
crawled along at a speed somewhere between that of a turtle and a snail”—none of
which was literally true. What counts is that the reader is entertained while reading
about what happened, and none of the similes, metaphors, and exaggerations mislead
a single reader one bit.
Exceptionally good first paragraphs buoy editors and prize-givers as well as readers. A
terrific ending will never be experienced by readers put off by a poor beginning, which
is why beginnings get so much emphasis here. What can the journalist writing news
stories on the run do to hook the reader?
When John F. Burns of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in 1993,
his paper reproduced the following paragraph as an example of his prize-winning style
in his reporting from the former Yugoslavia:
As the 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling city today,
exploding into buildings all around, a disheveled stubble-bearded man in formal
evening attire unfolded a plastic chair in the middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his
cello from its case and began playing Albinoni’s Adagio.
Burns helps us see a besieged city by focusing on a single individual performing an
eccentric and somehow beautiful act. Spotlighting an individual who is characterized,
however briefly, is an excellent way of involving the reader’s emotions.
Can it be done in the course of a reporter’s harried work? John Burns wrote 163 articles
in the former Yugoslavia in a little over nine months, 103 of them with Sarajevo
datelines at a time when TV crews couldn’t get into the city or get their film out of the
city. If Burns could write so many articles in so short a period and still remember not
just to report facts but to involve the reader’s emotions by focusing on an individual, no
journalist in a more comfortable environment has an excuse for not trying.
The workaday experience of reporting news, particularly local news, does not have the
built-in drama of reporting from a war zone, but that doesn’t prevent the use of the
same techniques to hook readers into local news stories. Let’s look at some examples
and determine what makes them work:
Yesterday morning Henry Sorbino walked into the K-Mart on Eleventh Street carrying an
umbrella and walked out carrying an umbrella and someone else’s purse.
What is the key ingredient that makes that opening sentence work? Did you note that
repeating the word “umbrella” underscored Sorbino’s walking out with someone else’s
purse? That technique—repetition for effect—increases the dramatic impact of what’s
being described.
Can you pick out the ingredient that makes the difference in the following lead?
At exactly 10:19 a.m. yesterday, a grandmother’s purse on a conveyor belt at Orange
County airport set off an alarm that caused two security guards to rush to the scene.
Did you note the word “grandmother”? The reporter could have said her name, Alice
Hackmeyer, instead, but it wouldn’t have created the same contrast with the event as
“grandmother” does.
Did you note also that the introduction of action—the security guards rushing to the
scene—helped dramatize that first sentence?
Here’s another easily adaptable technique. First the blah version:
The Buschkowski family moved from a rented apartment into its own home for the first
time today.
That doesn’t sound like news. And it certainly doesn’t sound interesting, though it is
factually accurate. How might a first sentence excite the reader’s curiosity?
It took fourteen years for the Buschkowski family to move two blocks.
That lead turns on the engine of curiosity, the driving force that gets readers beyond
the first sentences.
Here’s another blah beginning of a kind that’s found in hundreds of papers every day:
Carl Gardhof was sentenced in Superior Court to eighteen months in jail this morning.
It sounds as if the reporter, bored with reporting endless routine cases, decided to bore
his readers in turn. If he’d trained himself as an observer, he might have written the
following:
Carl Gardhof, his head held high as if he had done nothing wrong, was sentenced in
Superior Court to eighteen months in jail this morning.
A visual element can almost always be introduced to perk up a lead. This one conveys
the attitude of the person without the cliché of “maintaining his innocence.” We haven’t
yet found out what Carl Gardhof did. It’d be nice if it was for something like this:
Carl Gardhof, his head held high as if he had done nothing wrong, was sentenced in
Superior Court to eighteen months in jail this morning for stealing a Bible.
But even if it was for punching a policeman, or a third offense of shoplifting, or
whatever, that first sentence has it made because of the visual that starts it, which
needn’t be a head held high:
Carl Gardhof, who had trouble keeping his eyes on the judge, was sentenced in Superior
Court to six months in jail this morning for his fourth conviction of flashing in public. :
Most reported offenses sound ordinary. A visual touch can make them seem out-of-the-
ordinary and stimulate the reader to continue with the story.
If court reporting can be lifted out of dullness, think what technique can do for the
reporting of routine social events:
George Brucell was led into the meeting room by the chairman.
Again, blah.
George Brucell, a tall man, had to duck his head as the chairman ushered him into the
meeting room.
Head-ducking is not much of an action, but a reporter who is a keen observer of small
detail would have the advantage of the novelist in picturing Brucell and giving him an
action, however small, like ducking his head:
George Brucell, a tall man, had to duck his head as the chairman ushered him into the
meeting room to loud applause.
Better because of the introduction of sound.
The following are all from the New York Times. Note how they involve the reader by
focusing on a person:
Since learning last year that he had multiple sclerosis, Andy Torok has become less and
less steady on his feet, and his worries have accumulated along with the hand prints on
his apartment’s white walls.
That story made page one. Its real subject was the suspension of auto union talks
because workers were loath to chip in for health care costs. All the facts are in the body
of the story, but the reader, hooked by a beginning that focuses on an individual,
gathers the facts as he reads an interesting piece.
In enhancing journalism with the techniques of fiction, caution is required. It’s easy to
overdo the attempt at analogy. One can feel the New York Times reporter straining for
effect in the following attempt to lure the reader into the sometimes dull material of a
House of Representatives vote:
Washington, Aug. 5 [1993]—If politics is theater, as the skeptics say, tonight was classic
Hitchcock, with a very large dose of Frank Capra.
There on the House floor, Bill Clinton’s budget package and his Presidency clung to
credibility every bit like Eva Marie Saint in “North by Northwest,” clinging to the face of
Mount Rushmore. Mr. Clinton’s Democratic supporters held a 216-to-214 margin.
The following Times story starts the right way:
It is nearly 10 p.m. and the toll taker at the Triborough Bridge’s Manhattan Plaza is near
the end of her shift. Her routine is methodical, icily efficient. She glances out the
window to see the kind and size of vehicle approaching. She then pushes a button to
electronically post the fare on a display screen.
In a practiced movement, she reaches out for money. She hands back a token or
change. She does this 300 times an hour, three seconds a car, an endless stream of
stop-and-go.
Such are the labors of one of life’s invisible people, a toll taker for the Triborough Bridge
and Tunnel Authority, which last year collected $653.6 million from 277 million vehicles.
This particular transaction is recorded in grainy black-and-white images on a jerky
surveillance video tape. The woman, who officials would not name, is about to become
a statistic, one of 26 Bridge and Tunnel officers to be robbed at gunpoint this year,
already three times the number in all 1992.
A black car stops. A man in a ski mask thrusts a sawed-off shotgun through his window.
As quickly as the human mind can perceive and respond, the toll taker shoves a trayful
of money into his hands. The car lurches into the darkness.
So far so good. The writer, Douglas Martin, has pulled you through four paragraphs of a
story about robberies at tollbooths by focusing on an individual. But the hazard of
overdoing it is there. The next paragraph reads:
The woman pivots to catch the license plate number. Then her head drops like a rock,
her back heaves convulsively and she bites her lip. An armed sergeant is at her window
in 10 seconds. The robber has not been caught.
That paragraph needs editing. The account turns melodramatic. The toll taker’s head
drops like a cliché, her back “heaves convulsively”—and unbelievably. She clichés her
lip. And suddenly there is an armed sergeant at her window. Did she get the license
plate? We’ll never know.
Journalists seeking to pack as much information as possible into the opening paragraph
might usefully attend to the following by Natalie Angler, from the science section of the
New York Times:
As any serious migraine sufferer knows, an attack can bring pain without pity or
horizon, a pain so stupendous that it obliterates work, family, thought, otherness. Yet
for all its galactic sweep when it strikes, migraine is a mundane and commonplace
ailment, afflicting about 12 percent of the population. It is a trait passed along from
parent to offspring with the seeming ease of wispy hair or nearsightedness: three-
quarters of all sufferers are thought to have an inherited predisposition to the disorder.
Note the use of metaphoric language, “pain without pity or horizon.” How much
stronger “horizon” is than “endless” would be. Note also “galactic sweep,” an effective
and original way of conveying degree. Contrast helps. In the same sentence as
“galactic sweep” the ailment is characterized as “mundane and commonplace.”
(“Commonplace” alone would have served. See “One plus one equals one half,” page
205.) Instead of just tossing “genetic predisposition” at the reader, Angier talks of
“wispy hair or nearsightedness.” It’s a writerly paragraph that arouses our expectation
not only of
information but fine writing as well.
Here is a short list of reminders that can help if you’re drafting a first paragraph in a
hurry to meet a deadline: Does your first sentence trigger curiosity to make the reader
want to continue? What will the reader see in that first sentence? Have you focused on
an individual? Have you given us a visible characteristic of that individual? Have you
portrayed the individual doing or saying something? Is there a startling or odd fact that
will trap attention?
Let’s see what some experienced writers of features, articles, and books have been
doing with first sentences.
Andy Warhol, draftsman of shoes, is dead, and the people viewing his remains are
mostly wearing scuffed white sneakers.
Note the visual parallel. An obit or memorial piece doesn’t have to be dull. That was
Stuart Klawans, writing in Grand Street.
Jay McInerney knows how to make his opening sentence visual:
A year after his death, the recurring image I associate with Raymond Carver is one of
people leaning toward him, working very hard at the act of listening.
A novel comparison also makes a good hook:
At the Academy Awards, the entrance to the Shrine Civil Auditorium is flanked by four
giant Oscars quite, or so it seems to me, like sullen art deco Nazis.
The sentence might have been improved by omitting “or so it seems to me” but the
comparison is startling and strong nevertheless. It was by Stanley Elkin for Harper’s
magazine. Here’s another:
I’m talking to my friend Kit Herman when I notice a barely perceptible spot on the left
side of his face.
That’s Randy Shilts in Esquire focusing on an ominous blemish. Here’s a lead that might
be a turn-off:
The doctor told me that I had cancer of the prostate.
But Anatole Broyard was a brilliant as well as brave writer, and here’s how he actually
started his essay “Intoxicated by My Illness”:
So much of a writer’s life consists of assumed suffering, rhetorical suffering, that I felt
something like relief, even elation, when the doctor told me that I had cancer of the
prostate.
He enhances the hard fact with contrast, resonance, and surprise. In death, life.
Can you bring a fresh insight to your first sentence? Fiction writers are said to “reach
down their throats” for truths that enable them to write from the inside. Can candor at
the
beginning help your article, perhaps something you would rather the world not know
that you might keep secret if you were not a writer?
Alternatively, can you mint a new description for a familiar object the way Stanley Elkin
did when he saw the Academy Award statues as Art Deco Nazis?
Let’s look at some examples of first sentences from short nonfiction that has endured:
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent ...
That’s just the first half of the first sentence of George Orwell’s essay “Reflections on
Gandhi.” We don’t think of judging saints. And Orwell inverts the usual “innocent until
proven guilty,” producing two attention-getters in half a sentence.
Orwell, though best known for his novels Animal Farm and 1984, was one of the best
nonfiction writers of the century. No journalist, whether or not he covers political
events, should miss reading Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.”
Can good writing about natural history hook the reader at the start? Here’s an example
by Loren Eiseley:
I have long been an admirer of the octopus.
Octopus? Admirer? That opening is both surprising and a touch amusing. One goes on
reading, which is what first sentences are supposed to encourage.
A first sentence can be used to announce a theme dramatically. Witness the following
by Robert Warshow from Encounter magazine:
The two most successful creations of American movies are the gangster and the
Westerner: men with guns.
To demonstrate the use of effective first sentences in longer nonfiction, I have selected
first sentences from two autobiographies by authors I knew well:
Many problems confront an autobiographer, and I am confident that I have not solved
them. I see no reason why the reader should be interested in my private life.
Both examples entice with a slight surprise because they do the opposite of what we
expect. Both seem to be disclaimers. Each is a cover-up for a fault. They both might be
characterized as pseudo-candor, which can be as effective as candor. They are both
interesting beginnings that invite us to go on.
The first is from Sidney Hook’s Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century. The
second is from Bertram D. Wolfe’s A Life in Two Centuries, a book important enough to
make the front page of The New York Times Book Review.
Let’s move from first sentences in longer nonfiction to first paragraphs that invite the
reader to continue:
From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village
before I came. I was told before arriving that I would probably be a “sight” for the
village. I took this to mean that people of my complexion were rarely seen in
Switzerland, and also that city people are always something of a “sight” outside of the
city. It did not occur to me—possibly because I am an
American—that there could be people anywhere who had never seen a Negro.
That first paragraph is by a then largely unknown writer named James Baldwin. The last
sentence in the quoted paragraph could have been its first, an immediate hook, but if
the author had done that, the paragraph would wind down instead of building toward a
climax, which is more effective.
The subject of another first paragraph was the republication by Scribner’s of Peter
Fleming’s first book, written right after an adventure when he was only twenty-four. A
blah lead-in would have been:
Peter Fleming was only twenty-four when he experienced and wrote his Brazilian
Adventure.
Here’s how it was done:
Children, those energetic dervishes, are too busy testing themselves against the world
to know the meaning of boredom for very long; high adventure waits for them in every
breakable object. It is in adolescence that boredom, time without life, insinuates itself
into each passing day. But the adolescent with a good mind and a university education
to acquire may wait until he is 24 or more before life begins to pall. That is precisely the
age at which Peter Fleming, in 1932, answered an advertisement.
The fact in the last sentence of the paragraph would normally have gone into the first
sentence. It was put last for two reasons. It was given the job of thrusting the reader
forward into the next paragraph. More important was the establishment of tone.
In my first reading of nonfiction I sometimes find that a good lead is buried elsewhere in
the draft. Brought forward it can replace a less worthy beginning and help ensure that a
reader will be turned on to reading the whole.
Thomas Henry Huxley was a nineteenth-century physician credited with popularizing
Darwin’s ideas and other scientific thought of his time. Popularizing? Try, if you can, this
opening paragraph of his famous essay “The Method of Scientific Investigation”:
The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary
mode of working of the human mind. It is simply the mode at which all phenomena are
reasoned about, rendered precise and exact. There is no more difference, but there is
just the same kind of difference, between the mental operations of a man of science
and those of an ordinary person as there is between the operations and methods of a
baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in common scales and the operations of a
chemist in performing a difficult and complex analysis by means of his balance and
finely graduated weights. It is not that the action of the scales in the one case and the
balance in the other differ in the principles of their construction or manner of working,
but the beam of one is set on an infinitely finer axis than the other and of course turns
by the addition of a much smaller weight.
Huxley’s essay, believe it or not, is used as a model in some twentieth-century
textbooks. It is not, to put it mildly, a model of clarity, and it certainly isn’t interesting to
read. Let’s look at someone else’s treatment of the same material:
Scientific investigation is a precise yet commonplace way of examining information. A
baker or a butcher weighing out his goods and a chemist performing a difficult and
complex analysis with finely graduated weights are doing the same kind of thinking.
The edited example contains fewer than one quarter the words yet gets the idea across.
It is not the brevity that counts but the fact that the Huxley version is bloated with
abstractions and is boring to read. Huxley may have done his work as a scientist but not
as a writer. I would be willing to wager that any writer who has absorbed the material in
this chapter could write an opening paragraph that’s a lot more interesting than
Huxley’s.
Which leads me to an important point. The craft of creative writing is at least as
complex as the craft of science. I have one student who is an aeronautical engineer and
another who is an obstetrician, and I dare say both would admit that writing to a
professional standard involves craft at least as complex as their occupations. You
wouldn’t want a layman walking into a hospital operating theater to deliver a child. Nor
would you want a layman to design the next airplane you travel in. But writing? Can’t
everybody do it?
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