Animate a moribund lead sentence: don’t let your first impression become a last impression

Perhaps you’ve heard the expression “a first impression is a lasting impression”? Well, be forewarned: in writing, a first impression can become the last impression if you fail to whet the reader’s desire to keep reading.

If only I had a dollar for every dull first sentence I’ve ever read, such as:

The book I chose to write about is ...

My book report is about …

In contrast to coma-inducing lead sentences like those two above, check out the opening of Simon Winchester’s book The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary:

Popular myth has it that one of the most remarkable conversations in modern literary history took place on a cool and misty late autumn in 1896, in the small village of Crowthorne in the county of Berkshire.

Now this is a lead sentence guaranteed to generate desire in a reader to keep reading (as opposed to “The book I chose to write about is The Professor and the Madman…). How can any reader not want to learn how and why “one of the most remarkable conversations in modern literary history” took place in some remote English village nobody has ever heard of before? What’s the story behind that? Winchester, of course, continues to deliver throughout the opening chapter (the preface, actually) until we discover at the end that the meeting was between a famous lexicographer and the doctor who has helped him enormously in the task of creating his monumental dictionary -- a doctor who turns out (unbeknownst to the lexicographer) to be an inmate in an asylum for criminal lunatics. Modern literary history isn’t your cup of tea? Try the same technique with a different topic: “Popular myth has it that one of the most remarkable events in sports history took place on a dusty field in 1972, in an abandoned oil-company town in Oklahoma.” If you are a sports fan, wouldn’t you want to find out about this event lost to obscurity?

Notice too how Winchester (or maybe his book editor) knows how to pique interest using the book’s subtitle, which juxtaposes the salivating terms murder and insanity with the august Oxford English Dictionary. How can such unlikely things be paired together, the book browser wonders?

There are, of course, probably more than a thousand and one ways to entice the reader’s interest at the start of a piece of writing, but one of them certainly is NOT “The book I chose to write about is…”

© 2014 Bob Dial.  All rights reserved.