What's your secret weapon for crafting a killer hook in the introduction?

[Dennis]

OMG yes, this is my favorite part of writing! The hook is everything! It's like the trailer for a movie—if the trailer sucks, no one's watching the film.

My absolute, number-one, go-to secret weapon is finding a jaw-dropping fact or a mind-boggling statistic. It instantly makes your reader go, "Wait, what? Tell me more."

For example, if I'm writing about food waste, I wouldn't start with "Food waste is a big problem." BORING. I'd start with something like: "Did you know that nearly one-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally—that's about 1.3 billion tons per year, enough to feed every undernourished person on the planet four times over?"

It's concrete, it's shocking, and it immediately establishes the scale of the issue. It shows you've done your research and you're not just spitting out generic ideas. Plus, finding that stat is like a little treasure hunt. I can waste (pun intended) a whole hour falling down a rabbit hole of cool data, but when I find that perfect hook, it gets me so hyped to write the rest of the paper. Highly reccomend trying it! What's your guys' go-to?

 

[MaryaL]

Seriously. The EPA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the World Bank, the UN. All have public data, all free, all reliable. Your food waste stat? Probably from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization. Those reports are GOLD.

For my environmental policy paper, I found a CDC report showing that 1 in 3 Americans live in areas with failing air quality standards. That's not just a stat—it's an ARGUMENT waiting to happen.

The key is making sure the stat is RELEVANT to your thesis, not just shocking for shock value. Your food waste stat directly sets up an argument about inefficiency and ethics. That's why it works.