Starting point essay

Even though it’s fine to reference a quote in your introduction, we don’t recommend you start your essay with a direct quote. Use your own words to sum up the views you’re mentioning, for example: As Einstein often reiterated, experiments can prove theories, but experiments don’t give birth to theories.

Use the Historical Present Tense An effective method of beginning an essay is to use historical present tense to relate an incident from the past as if it were happening now. "Ben and I are sitting side by side in the very back of his mother’s station wagon.

Of course, once you’ve done your plan and have your arguments laid out, you need to actually put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and begin your essay. You need to consider that your reader doesn’t have a clue about your topic or arguments, so your first sentence must summarise these.

Obviously, there are no LOLs, LMFAOs, and OMGs. But formal academic writing can be much more subtle than this, and as we've mentioned above, requires great skill. So, to get you started on polishing your own essay writing ability, try using the words in this list as an inspirational starting point.