Hooks for Essays: How to Help Your Students Start Writing
Have you ever struggled to write a hook before? Well, we have, and now we’re going to tell you about it.
If you’ve been teaching high school English for any length of time, you’ve likely seen hooks for essays just as cringe-inducing as the horror above. If we had a dollar for each essay we’ve read that began with some variation on “Have you ever . . .? Well, I have . . .,” our Starbucks fund would be set for life.
Ask any high school student what a hook is, and they can probably rattle off a definition: “It’s how you grab your reader’s attention.” Writing hooks for essays, however, pushes many of our students to their breaking point.
Hooks for essays have value: they are, in fact, intended to grab a reader’s attention and give them an indication of what an essay is going to be about. If our students are going to be effective writers, they do need to be able to craft a hook rather than just writing a thesis statement and calling their introduction done.
But writing hooks for essays is really hard to do, even for strong writers, and if we’re honest, it can often feel like with all the work we need to do on essays, it’s not worth the challenge to teach. It’s only one little sentence, after all!
Sometimes you and your students need a quick win when it comes to writing, so we do think it’s worth it, and we’ve got a couple tricks up our sleeves to make this task just a little bit easier for our students (and, thus, for you).
Why Writing Hooks for Essays Is So Hard for Students
Writing hooks for essays is hard for students because, if we’re being honest, it’s just plain hard for all of us.
We can systematize almost every other sentence in a student’s essay, providing them with a sentence starter, a prompt, or a go-to formula (5C paragraph, anyone?).
But a hook? It’s too creative, too personal, too tied to the content of the specific essay. If a hook is going to grab your attention, it has to be original, after all. Students are left staring at a blank page, willing something to come to mind. “What should I say?” they plaintively ask, desperately hoping we will give them “the answer” and often refusing to move on until they come up with something.
And creativity is hard. Writing hooks for essays is like writing hooks for blog posts, and let us tell you: sometimes the well is dried. up.
It’s enough, quite frankly, to make us ask, “Why bother?” Confession: for years we didn’t bother. After all, we’ve never seen an essay scoring rubric that gives points for a hook, so it’s not like a hook is going to make or break any student’s essay. We told students to write one and called it a day.
Why It’s Worth Teaching Students to Write Hooks for Essays
Tempting as it is to find little value in teaching our students how to write the perfect hook, it is worth devoting at least a little bit of time to.
After all, hooks aren’t going away. Anyone who teaches writing will tell students to start with a hook, and when students get into the workforce, they may need to write hooks, especially if they work in marketing of any kind.
Hooks can also be little confidence-boosters: if students can figure out something to say when they’re staring down that blank page, it gives them the momentum they need to start powering through the remaining sentences (for which they probably have quite a bit more to say).
Most importantly, perhaps, is the value in teaching our more proficient writers to improve the quality of their hooks. Because writing a hook is so unique to each particular essay, doing so can be a key way to help our young writers develop their own voice and style, a clear opportunity for creativity in an otherwise formal writing assignment.
All that being said, however, remember what we said about rubrics: we have yet to see a rubric that incorporates the quality of a student’s hook into that students’ final score. Writing high-quality hooks for essays is not a hill to die on, and it’s important for us to remember that and to communicate it to those students who just can’t get started.
go-to hooks
Hook Types that Work for Any Essay
Anecdote
Students might consider beginning with a brief story that introduces the topic they’re about to address. This is how many magazine articles begin, and it can be a powerful way to draw in the reader by humanizing a topic. We also told students they could think of this as “setting a scene,” or providing descriptive details that help a reader to imagine they are in a place with the writer.
Generalization
One of the most common types of hooks for essays is a broad statement that applies to many people. The writer then narrows down to a more specific topic over the course of the introduction and into the thesis statement (and then often widens back out by referencing the hook in the conclusion). You’ll probably have to help students move away from “Throughout history” or “Since the beginning of time” statements, but hey, at least that’s a starting place.
Quotation
Students can also begin an essay with a quotation, one that doesn’t have to be from the text they’re writing about but can be from another source or even from another form of literature, like a song lyric or line from a movie. If students choose a quotation from outside the source provided or expected for the essay, it demonstrates to their reader that they’ve thought about the work within the context of their own life.
Startling Fact
Another strategy we recommended to students was beginning with a startling fact, perhaps by Googling a statistic related to their topic. This is certainly a way to grab readers’ attention, and it’s something students can find relatively easily. It’s helpful to emphasize to students that they’re looking for a fact that would surprise someone, that would counter what most people would consider to be true. A fact that confirms what most people already believe is not so startling.
Wait, what about the question as a hook? you might be wondering. After many years of seeing “Have you ever . . .? Well, I have . . .” hooks, we banned* them from our classroom. Is it possible to begin an essay with a thought-provoking question? Of course it is. But our students rarely challenged themselves to come up with an interesting question, and the effect was to make their writing seem immature right from the first sentence. We wanted them to learn some other ways to tackle the challenge that were more likely to result in a “high school” voice.
*We didn’t literally ban them, but students did have to get our approval before using them, and we gave quite a bit of pushback on mediocre questions, suggesting instead they turn them into generalizations (which is what they usually were anyway). For those questions we approved, we emphasized that the essay needed to, at some point, answer the question.
Students Need to Practice Writing Hooks for Essays
There are two strategies we found particularly useful in helping our students write better hooks.
First, we introduced them to the four types of hooks for essays and gave them examples of each type. Students benefit from seeing good examples if we want to help them improve their writing skills. Showing students the opening paragraphs of magazine articles and blog posts is probably one of the best ways we can help them: after all, in a world where clicks are king, journalists and bloggers have to grab attention quickly, and they have often mastered a “conversational yet professional” tone that our strongest writers need to see as they develop their own voices.
Then, we had students practice identifying examples of the four types of hooks. Not only did this help students to get a better sense of what the terms mean, but it gave them even more opportunities to see examples of good hooks.
Finally, we assigned students to write a few of their own hooks for a variety of essay types. By asking students to only write a hook, we allowed them to zero in on this important skill (and gain confidence in their abilities), and by asking them to write a hook for a variety of essay genres, we helped them to see the applicability of these four types no matter what the prompt is.
Depending on your students’ comfort with the skill of writing hooks, it might be helpful to start by having them write hooks in groups or with a partner (collaboration often aids creativity, after all) before writing them independently. We also like to have students share their hooks aloud, providing even more opportunities for students to hear what hooks can sound like. If you worry about bad hooks getting bad reactions, you can also collect all the hooks and put them in a single document anonymously, eliminating any unwanted public humiliation.
Tips to Help Students Who Are Really Struggling
For many of our students, this little bit of practice is all they need to feel like writing hooks is a skill they can master. But when we have students who just can’t think of anything, the hook can become a roadblock to the entire writing process.
Sometimes, we’ll ask these students a question: What do you think is interesting about _________? Do you know any songs related to this topic? Can you find any statistics related to this topic? That’s often enough to get them going.
Sometimes, we’ll encourage students to start with the word “imagine.” Imagine you’re [insert crazy situation or description of setting here]. This can spark enough creativity to get them away from a clichéd or bland generalization.
We also tell these students to just skip it and come back to it later. In the best-case scenario, actually beginning the writing process will shake loose an idea or at least give them the confidence and momentum to come up with something. In the worst-case scenario, they forget to come back, but at least they will have written the rest of the essay (which is, after all, the part that’s scored).
Creativity isn’t easy, and this makes writing hooks for essays particularly challenging for our students, who want easy answers and quick fixes. And of course, it’s not a make-or-break skill: our students can become perfectly adequate writers without mastering the art of a good hook. But, especially for our more proficient writers, it’s a skill worth giving them at least a little bit of practice with.
Looking for a quick and easy lesson to introduce hooks to your students? Check out our Writing Hooks lesson plan, which comes with a visually engaging Google Slides presentation that introduces the four types of hooks (with examples), an activity in which students practice identifying types of hooks (offering them an additional three sets of samples), and an activity in which students practice writing hooks for four essay prompts of different genres. We’ve also included a printable 11×17” poster you can display to remind your students of their options throughout the year.