A hook, in an essay, is basically the name given to the introductory statement that aims to grab the attention of the reader and retain it so that they go through the entire content.
When the hook is well-crafted, the essay develops the property of being engaging and catchy – which helps it become more valuable and reader-friendly.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at what a hook is and how you can create it when starting off your essay.
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Understanding a bit more about hooks
We did just start off this post with the definition, but we want to make it a bit more elaborate.
A hook is a starting that attracts the reader. That is the simple definition. However, there are different types when it comes to hooks. For example,
• There are some hooks that owe their attraction quality to an intriguing statistic. When a statistic is mentioned in the hook and when it is the primary element that grabs the attention of the reader, it is known as a statistic hook.
• In the same way, the hooks that become engaging and attractive due to featuring a question inside them are known as “question hooks.” They evoke interest from the reader by creating curiosity for the answer to the asked question.
These are some of the many types of hooks that you can use in your essays. As long as the introductory parts of the essay are engaging and catchy – it would be known as a hook.
How do you write a good hook?
Here are some tips that you can follow to write a hook:
1. Make sure your wording is concise
Hooks have to be small and brief. If they get too long, they can become boring and tedious – and they can get abandoned by the user as well. If you want to make your hook a hook, to begin with,and if you want to make it engaging enough, you should keep it concise.
For example, if the first sentence of your essay goes like this:
Of interest is the fact that the entire Earth, which is a planet of the solar system, has more than 8 billion people – people who are located in many different geographical locations, which brings us to elaborate the purpose of our statement, i.e., that there are many individuals alive right now.
It would look horrendous. Even though, technically, this is a statistical hook, it is so horribly written that it doesn’t look, sound, or seem like one.
To keep everything concise, here are some things that you can do:
• Make use of small descriptive words
• Don’t add any elaborative details to the hook. That is something you have to do in the essay itself
• Keep the sentence(s) of the hook brief. Don’t make it like the example that we just gave above. At most, the length of the sentence should be 20 words and no more.
2. Make sure that the hook is readable
Apart from conciseness, another thing that you have to ensure in the hook is readability. While you can get away with using some hard words and complex sentence formation in a few places somewhere along in your essay, the hook is where you have to be simple and straightforward.
The reason behind that is simple.
If the hook is not readable, it would convey the same impression about the rest of the essay. This would, in turn, cause the reader to leave right from the start.
For example, here is what a non-readable hook would look like:
One of the most sesquipedalian terms (pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis) in the English lexicon is, surprisingly, of a pleonastic and sarcastic nature since it is ostentatiously the name of a disease, whereas it was coined by a person in derision.
This is, technically, a hook since it informs the reader of an interesting fact, which can further be used to lead the reader into the essay itself.
But, due to its complex nature, it doesn’t have any appeal whatsoever.
Here are some things that you can do to make your hook readable:
• Use easy words in the hook. Don’t use any words that aren’t typically used in normal conversation.
• Use active voice in the hook. Passive voice means trouble for readability.
One tip that many people aren’t aware of – when it comes to maintaining readability in content – is that there are several online tools that they can take help from. For one, if you write some text for the hook of your essay, you can improve its readability using an online paraphrasing tool.
An online paraphrasing tool is specially built to rephrase and reword content. That is its simple function. But nowadays – what with advancements in AI – these tools are capable of actively improving the quality of the text they’re given. You can use a paraphraser to your benefit by improving readability.
3. Make sure there are no grammar errors or mistakes in the hook
The hook that starts off your essay is essentially a representation of what the actual content islike. If the hook is tricky to read, the same is conveyed about the essay itself.
Considering this little dynamic, it’s easy to appreciate why it’s important to ensure complete grammatical and spelling perfection in the hook. If there are grammar errors and spelling mistakes in the hook, the reader will get the same impression about the essay.
Avoiding grammar and spelling errors isn’t that difficult. Here is what you have to do:
• Read the hook once you write it to find and fix any errors that you may have accidentally made. You should do this at least a couple of times.
• You can also use AI tools like Grammarly and GrammarCheck for checking grammar mistakes in the hook. Using a tool can be a good precautionary measure since they’re quick and they don’t skip over errors as a human would.
Conclusion
To engage the reader in reading your essay, you need to add a good hook at the start. There are different ways in which you can create a hook – such as by adding a fact, a statistic, a question, etc.
The hook itself has to be carefully crafted. For one, it has to be concise and readable. It also has to be grammatically perfect. In the post above, we’ve talked about all of this in detail. The next time you have to write an essay, we hope you’ll utilize these pointers to come up with a good hook.
