getting started Hooks Defined Types of Hooks Style in Hooks Examples of Hooks Table of contents A HOOK is the opening of anything you write Provide a juicy idea that will make your reader want to continue reading As the metaphor suggests you want to hook the audience into what you are wri ID: 707714
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Slide1
A Lesson on Hooks and Openings
getting started:Slide2
Hooks Defined
Types of Hooks
Style in HooksExamples of Hooks
Table of contentsSlide3
A HOOK is the opening of anything you write. Provide a juicy idea that will make your reader want to continue reading. As the metaphor suggests, you want to hook the audience into what you are writing about
Hooks: A DefinitionSlide4
A bit of dialogue
An unusual statement
An exciting moment from the story (i.e.
in medias res
)
An especially vivid description
Narrative HooksSlide5
“’You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.’”—Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman”
Example of dialogueSlide6
“The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being”—Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Ugly Tourist”
Example of an unusual statementSlide7
Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” (1992) opens with a funny scene in Uncle Bob’s Pancake House. Then Tarantino employs
in medias res
by skipping past the robbery and to the getaway, when Tim Roth’s (Mr. Orange) character is bleeding in the back of Harvey Keitel’s (Mr. White) car.
Example of
In Medias Res
Keitel, Tarantino, Madsen, Bunker, Buscemi, and TierneySlide8
“A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the Kiowas, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The hardest weather in the world is there. Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic winds arise in the spring, and in summer the prairie is an anvil’s edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet.”—N. Scott Momaday’s “The Way to Rainy Mountain”
Example of vivid descriptionSlide9
“In the long, tedious hours between soundcheck and showtime, Brian Wilson likes to park himself at the side of the stage, hidden behind the curtains, in an oversize black chair. The chair has traveled with him Tokyo to Tel Aviv and back home to the Pantages Theater in Hollywood tonight. Dressed in a lavender button-down, sweatpants and white Nikes, Wilson sits impassively atop his faux-leather throne, munching sushi rolls as the preshow noise and bustle swirl around him.”
Rolling Stone Magazine
Hooks
The Beach BoysSlide10
Interesting or shocking
Fact
2. Interesting or shocking Idea 3. Interesting or shocking Statistic4. Interesting or shocking
Quote
5. A
Personal Narrative
(or personal experience)
6.
In Medias Res or “in the middle of things”7.
Vivid Description
of a significant event
8. A
Rhetorical Question
Types of hooksSlide11
The key to writing a great hook is to artfully, descriptively, and clearly give your audience an interesting idea to think about that reveals a lot about your subject, but not everything (you want to leave them wanting more).
Style in hooksSlide12
Let us look at some examplesSlide13
“Inadequate sleep causes more than $400 billion in economic losses annually in the United States and results in 1.23 million lost days of work each year, researchers have found”—
The New York Times
article “You’re Getting Very Sleepy. (So Is Everyone Else)” by Bilal Choudhry
Example of a Hook with a statisticSlide14
“On a chilly day in August 2016, more than 300 reindeer, huddled for warmth, dropped dead on a mountain plateau in Norway. They died by lightening.”—
The New York Times
article “Hundred of Reindeer Died by Lightening. Their Carcasses Became a Laboratory” by Steph Yin
Example of a hook with a shocking factSlide15
“After just a few hours of letting the current comb through his net in the Copper River, Shane Cummings knew that something wasn’t right”—
The New York Times
article “A Dwindling Catch Has Alaskans Uneasy” by Julia O’Malley
Example of a hook with a narrativeSlide16
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”—the opening of Charles Dickens’
A Tale of Two Cities
Some examples of great hooks: LiteratureSlide17
Luis Rodriguez opens
Always Running
in dramatic fashion. “This memory begins with flight. A 1950s bondo-spackled Dodge surged through a driving rain, veering around the potholes and upturned tracks of the abandoned Red Line trains on Alameda” (Rodriguez 13).
Some examples of great hooks: LiteratureSlide18
Gabriel Garcia Marquez opens his famous novel
Love in the Time of Cholera
by penning, “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love”
Some examples of great hooks: LiteratureSlide19
“First, that face, lengthened by a few vertical lines like scars dug long ago by sleepless nights; a badly shaven face, worked by time.”—opening of Tahar ben Jelloun’s award-winning novel
The Sand Child
Some examples of great hooks: LiteratureSlide20
“Something has happened to me, I can’t doubt it any more. It came as an illness does, not like an ordinary certainty, not like anything evident. It came cunningly, little by little…and I was able to persuade myself that nothing was the matter with me…and now, it was blossoming”—opening of
Nausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Some examples of great hooks: LiteratureSlide21
“It is Christmas Eve in the year of…1969. Three hundred Chicanos have gathered in front of St. Basil’s Roman Catholic Church. Three hundred brown-eyed children of the sun have come to drive the money-changers out of the richest temple in Los Angeles”—beginning of Oscar Zeta Acosta’s
The Revolt of the Cockroach People
Some examples of great hooks: LiteratureSlide22
Author Walter Lew opens with a
quote
from the rapper Ice Cube, “Or your little chop-suey ass will be a target.” Then, Lew continues with,
“Last summer, four black cops arrested me because I was ‘dat chinese man.’” You want proof?” opening of Walter Lew’s essay “Black Korea.”
Some examples of great hooks: EssaysSlide23
“I’ve been around and seen the Taj Mahal and the Grand Canyon and Marilyn Monroe’s footprints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater, but I’ve never seen my mother wash her own hair.”—the opening of “Hair” by Marcia Aldrich
Some examples of great hooks: Essays
The Grand Canyon in ArizonaSlide24
“I first saw death when I was a small boy in the little village where I was born. It was a cool summer night and the sky was as clear as day and the ripening rice fields were golden in the moonlight,” the opening of “I Would Remember” by Carlos Bulosan
Some examples of great hooks: EssaysSlide25
“The night before the world changed completely I was driving back to New York late, after lecturing at Drew University in exurban New Jersey. The sky was relatively clear and I did what I often do on such occasions”—opening of David Halberstam’s “Who We Are”
Some examples of great hooks: EssaysSlide26
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets”
--opening of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”
Some examples of great hooks: PoetrySlide27
“Mickey Cohen was not a man used to being shaken down. Threatened with handguns, blasted with shotguns, strafed on occasion by a machine gun, yes. Firebombed and dynamited, sure. But threatened, extorted—hit up for $20,000—no.”—beginning of John Buntin’s
L.A. Noir
Some examples of great hooks: non-fictionSlide28
“Whether we listen with aloof amusement to the dreamlike mumbo jumbo of some red-eyed witch doctor of the Congo, or read with cultivated rapture thin translations from the sonnets of the mystic Lao-tse”—opening of Joseph Campbell’s
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Some examples of great hooks: Non-fictionSlide29
“Cecil B. DeMille would have loved this moment. Here I was sitting in a limo at the ramp leading into the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, waiting for my team to arrive, while an ecstatic crowd of ninety-five thousand plus fans, dressed in every possible combination of Lakers purple and gold”—opening of Phil Jackson’s
Eleven Rings
Some examples of great hooks: Sports writing
Phil JacksonSlide30
“Roy Hobbs pawed at the glass before thinking to prick a match with his thumbnail and hold the spurting flame in his cupped palm close to the lower berth window, but by then he had figured it was a tunnel they were passing through and was no longer surprised”—beginning of Bernard Malamud’s
The Natural
Some examples of great hooks: Sports writingSlide31
“When I was a young researcher, just starting out, something happened that changed my life. I was obsessed with understanding how people cope with failures, and I decided to study it by watching how students grapple with hard problems”—opening of
Mindset
by Dr. Carol S. Dweck
Some examples of great hooks: psychologySlide32
Time: 5-10 minutesActivity: Use one of the 6 types of hooks, use very vivid detail, and (preferably) at least one rhetorical device to construct a hook for your current essay. Some definitions and examples of rhetorical devices can be found in your supplemental handbook.
Writing a hook Exercise