so I'm a tutor at my school's writing lab and a lot of times when my TTS come to me they say they have trouble writing their introduction so today I'm going to talk a little bit about the intro funnel okay so this is what our intro funnel looks like and notice that the top is very wide and the bottom is very skinny and an introduction is kind of like that because it starts off very general and then you narrow down into something very specific which winds up being your thesis first we start off with the hook and that's at the widest part of our funnel meaning it's the most general part of our intro and what the hook does is it's basically a statement or a quote that gets the reader interested in what you're writing now if you skip down to the bottom of the funnel or the skinniest part that's where your thesis goes and it goes there because it's the most specific part of your paper it tells your reader what you're going to be talking about and the sentences in between these sentences basically get more specific spe ific as you go and they kind of connect you from your general hook to your thesis in here might be a good time to mention what book or article you're writing about all right so let's do an example for the sake of this video let's say that our thesis is Beyonce's video for single ladies put a ring on it is one of the best videos of all time because it is well-crafted and has a very unique style so now we're going to write sentences for our intro that funnel into that thesis statement I've decided that my Hook is going to be people today still talk about the events that occurred during MTV's Video Music Awards in 2009 so you can see it's a very broad statement but it still introduces the idea of music videos and that year of music to our readers now I'm going to get a little less General and say many talented artists were nominated for best female video that year including Taylor Swift's for you belong with me and Beyonce for single ladies put a ring on it so what we're doing here is we're introducing our reader to the idea of Beyonce in her music video which is in our thesis now we're going to get more specific and say Taylor Swift ultimately won the award and as she gave her victory speech Kanye West interrupted her arguing that Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time so by doing this we are introducing our argument that Beyonce's video was the best one now for our even more specific or narrow statement we're going to say Kanye West's claim is valid and this is even more specific because we are telling our reader which side we are taking on this and that brings us back to the most specific part of our intro which is our thesis statement that says Beyonce's video for single ladies put a ring on it is one of the best videos of all time because it was well crafted and has a very unique style so you can see how we started off with something really general which was just talking about the MTV Video Music Awards and we funneled that down into talking about why Beyonce's video was the best video of all time and this is kind of just a rough layout of an intro you can obviously add more sentences or take some away but the point to remember is that it gets more and more specific as you go yeah so I hope this gave you a little more insight on how to write an introduction good luck