The Hook - how to open your article.

Following on from the last post, looking at a useful structure for writing articles, I’m going to take a quick look at the “hook” paragraph. This is, as we all have drummed into us at school, the opening and introduction to your piece. It is, after all, the first impression you give of yourself and your ideas. Still, it’s easy enough to say that, but how does that work in practice? What is right and wrong? Is there even a right and wrong?

Well, what I come across quite often (I’ll admit it right now, cards on the table, I am an English teacher by day) is an overly formal, formulaic style to these openings. This is possibly a carry-over from essay and report writing structures from other subjects (History, I’m looking at you), where a formal setting out of goals and targets is suitable for an opening.

But it is not useful for magazine articles. Not at all.

What you do want to do is grab people’s attention and illustrate your key idea(s). Not everything you want to say but what you have decided are the most important aspects.

Now, how to grab people’s attention? Should it be linguistic? Should it be through tone or imagery? Should it be through a fact or a key piece of information? Hey, it could be any of those approaches and it’s really dictated by your point of view and what you want to say.

So, we’re looking at 2-3 sentences that need to make an impression. I always consider the impression you give to your reader to be like the impression you want to give to an employer at a job interview. Instead of a suit and tie, we have ideas and our writing style, but it works the same. Like an interviewer faced with a shabbily dressed applicant, decisions are made by the reader within those first few lines and you won’t win them back after that – largely because they will have skipped over to the next site…

Anyway, so you need to think about the key information for your story an how you’re going to convey it. In this way, it is story-telling and the best articles are written by authors who aren’t so quick to draw a dividing line between genres.

For this example, I’ll use The Butterfly and the Bell Jar by Jean-Dominique Bauby (check out the details on wiki, if you’re interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diving_Bell_and_the_Butterfly ).

So it’s an autobiography written by the former editor-in-chief of the French Elle magazine who developed locked-in-syndrome after a massive stroke. So the facts are striking and the subject needs to be dealt with sensitively, but there’s a lot of information to work with.

With Locked-in syndrome leaving the author unable to speak, or move anything except his left eye, the writing of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is as much a reaffirmation of the human spirit as it is an impressive piece of literature. For, as painfully honest and wonderfully written as it is, one cannot but keep returning to the life that birthed the story and reflect on all that was lost. Surely, it must be said, the sign of a successful autobiography.

Ok, so I went for an opening with the most important bits of information: Locked-in syndrome, what that actually means, the autobiography that came from it, and why we should all read it.

You can get a feel very early on for what you want to say, so there is value in listing off the key elements before knitting them together in one efficient sentence. Of course, it can feel a little overloaded and that is for you to judge and edit accordingly. It can be at that point that you trim back, leave a little more for the second sentence or the later paragraphs.

I could have approached it with a colder definition for Locked-in syndrome, giving a bit of distance before we get to know the man. I could also have started with a quote, maybe from the author, possibly from the text, or maybe by anyone with something valuable to say about the themes of the text.

All I am saying really is that there are many ways to get started. There aren’t set rights and wrongs, only your instincts. The instincts come from practice and looking at alternatives. Early on, it would be sensible to try out two or three different ways of introducing your piece before choosing the best one. With practice you will find the right path more instinctively but, until then, you can only plan and practice.
Have fun and get writing!