An Intro to Writing Introductions

Posted: October 09, 2013

[caption id="attachment_11590" align="alignright" width="771"]Image HubSpot[/caption]Introductions can be the hardest part of writing. The best intros are short and sweet, but effective. Whet your reader's appetite with a killer intro.

Corey Eridon, ‎Inbound Marketing Content Manager at HubSpot, walks through creating simple introductions.

How to Write an Introduction

Blink. Blink. Blink.

It's the dreaded cursor-on-a-blank-screen experience all writers -- amateur or professional, aspiring or experienced -- know and dread. And nowhere does it plague writers more than when they're writing their intros.

I mean, you already have a blog post you want to write. Can't you just dive in and write it? Why all the pomp and circumstance with this dag-blasted introduction!?

Well, intros don't have to be long (in fact, I prefer them to be quite quick), nor do they have to be hard. But they do have to exist. They tee the reader up for the content they're about to read, and provide context for the rest of your post.

So let's break down exactly how to write an introduction that's short, effective, and relatively painless. If you're ever having trouble churning out those intros, come back here and re-read this formula to lift yourself out of that writing rut.

How to Write an Intro

As a lover of all things meta, I will, of course, use this post's introduction as an example of how to write an intro. Let's break down all the components of this post's introduction so you have a formula to refer to.

Component 1: Grab the Reader's Attention

There are a lot of ways to do this. You can be empathetic or tell a story, so the reader immediately feels an emotional resonance with the piece (Yeah! This post totally gets me!). You could tell a joke (Ha! This is fun! Let's read more of this!). You could shock the reader with a crazy fact or stat (Whoa! That's crazy! I must know more!). For this intro, I went the "empathetic" route.

Read the entire article How to Write an Introduction, at HubSpot.