English essay openers

The sentence openers for essays resource is an excellent starting point to help less confident writers scaffold their analytical writing. This particular resource is framed around literary analysis so each sentence starter for the beginning of the paragraph speaks about the 'author'.

Only a sentence, casually placed as a footnote in the back of Justin Kaplan's thick 2003 biography of Walt Whitman, but it goes off like a little explosion: "Bram Stoker based the character of Dracula on Walt Whitman." . . . (Mark Doty, "Insatiable." Granta #117, 2011) I have wonderful friends. In this last year, one took me to Istanbul.

This particular resource is framed around literary analysis so each sentence starter for the beginning of the paragraph speaks about the 'author'. It is important to remind students that if they are writing about a play, they should replace this with 'playwright' and if it is non-fiction, they should write about the 'writer' or 'journalist'.

(Dudley Clendinen, "The Good Short Life." The New York Times Sunday Review, July 9, 2011) What these opening lines have in common is that all have been reprinted (with complete essays attached) in recent editions of The Best American Essays, an annual collection of crackling good reads culled from magazines, journals, and websites.