Read that again. "Benjamin Franklin was born on Milk Street in Boston..." is the opening line about the literary career of Benjamin Franklin and I'm ready to sit at the table and devour the essay. Reason 1: I just finished watching Carolyn Steel's "How Food Shapes Our Cities" which discussed the naming of streets after food and the griddle started popping. Reason 2: Because of Reason 1, I stopped to closely examine the sentence. I noticed it didn't start with the typical introduction of the year of his birth. It begins with a totally random fact that most people probably don't know. They might know he was born in Boston; but would they have known the name of the street?
First impressions matter more in writing than simple introductions of, "Hi, my name is..." unless you're Ishmael. You have to capture the audience interests while providing them with an introduction to the essay topic. Too often I fall into the droll academia introduction which inspires NO interest because the introduction isn't the meat of the writing. And that's wrong. The introduction is the most important part... as my mother always says, "People judge you by your first impression. It's not always right or fair, but they do." Unfortunately, the same applies to writing.
How do you make a great first impression? I have no idea... yet. Let's examine other literary culinary creations. I went to the American Book Review for their article on "100 Best First Lines from Novels" and was proud to know many of them. These are imaginative. However, they don't tell us much about the story (except for: "I am an invisible man.") What they do is make you ask questions, "Who is Ishmael?" and "How did you become invisible?' The reader is engaged like melting butter on pancakes. Otherwise, you'd sit there staring at cold pancakes. Blah!
I have a collection of journal articles concerning literary criticism and started going through them just looking at the first line:
- Two bridges span the Delaware River between Philadelphia and New Jersey, one named for Benjamin Franklin, the other for Walt Whitman. - "The Loafer and the Loaf-Buyer"
- Criticism of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, often indistinguishable from commentary on the author himself, oscillates fairly predictably between two positions. - "Urban Bifocals"
- The strange silence that haunts the interpretation of Sarah Kemble Knight's Journal is doubly odd, given the continued prominence of the text in an American literature canon. - "Narrative and Class in a Culture of Consumption"
- The inception of American regionalism is routinely identified by scholars in either Robert Beverly or William Byrd II, both native Virginians who wrote intensely local works which are amongst the enduring literary products of colonial America. - "Industry and Idleness in Colonial Virginia"
- Few commodities in Atlantic history can be as humble as the plantation hoe. - "The Plantation Hoe"
- One thread in the American nineteenth-century discourse of sentiment wraps itself around women's bodies. - "Cultural Rhetorics of Women's Corsets"
Which one appeals the most to you? Why?
Word Count: 514
Total Edits: 0
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