A common question I get from writing students is how to open a piece of writing that will grab the reader's attention. One of two dozen ways that comes to mind is to express a doubt, a way to admit to one's indifference, inexperience, ignorance, innocence, or intolerance. Laying down this notion early in a treatise will make an honest, self-reflective audience continue reading, as they sense an imminent transformation. In his exposition "Looking for Rilke," in Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry. poet and essayist Robert Hass employs this technique when he writes about Rainer Maria Rilke:
In using such a technique, I would caution writers to profess a lack of knowledge about a topic that someone in their position would not be expected to know. An IT engineer is not admitting to much if he professes an ignorance of art history, but we would be inclined to read his proposal if he wrote that he doubts the reliability of a widely used analytics formula. Similarly, few of us would assume that an American medical doctor would be expert on Venezuelan politics, but we would be all ears and eyes if she wonders whether a commonly accepted therapy is highly overrated.
Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" on Words on the Line:
He was born a year after Robert Frost, in 1875, a little too soon to be a young modernist, and the dissimilarity between his work and Frost's is so great that the fact does not help anchor for me a sense of his life.Hass devotes the next 41 pages of the essay to discovering more deep insights—for himself and us—into the artistic genius of this lyrical poet from Prague.
In using such a technique, I would caution writers to profess a lack of knowledge about a topic that someone in their position would not be expected to know. An IT engineer is not admitting to much if he professes an ignorance of art history, but we would be inclined to read his proposal if he wrote that he doubts the reliability of a widely used analytics formula. Similarly, few of us would assume that an American medical doctor would be expert on Venezuelan politics, but we would be all ears and eyes if she wonders whether a commonly accepted therapy is highly overrated.
Read previous installments of "Splendid Sentences" on Words on the Line:
- Part 1: James Baldwin on Artists
- Part 2: Stanley Karnow on the Vietnam Memorial
- Part 3: Steven Pinker on Human Progress
- Part 4: Martin Luther King Jr. on Injustice
- Part 5: Andrew Sullivan on Religious Fundamentalism
- Part 6: Carl Sagan on the Environment
- Part 7: Harold Bloom on Shakespeare
- Part 8: Richard Bradley on Openers
- Part 9: T. S. Eliot on Dante
- Part 10: Edward Albee on Carson McCullers
- Part 11: John Donne on Immortality
- Part 12: William Styron on Robert Penn Warren
