The opening paragraph can make or break your essay. Start with a hook and you stand the chance to grab your reader’s attention.
Implement some guesswork and write the introduction haphazardly, and you could lose them completely. But can you start an essay with a quote?
You can start an essay with a quote, but you must do so with caution. Accompany the quote with a clear explanation to help a reader understand how and why it fits in your work. More importantly, ensure the quote you include in your essay is from a credible scholarly source.
Understand that relevant, helpful, and equally credible quotes can capture the attention of a reader, not to mention easily related the thesis statement of your essay.
Key Takeaways
- Quotes can help to spike readers’ interest, making it a powerful writing technique that gets them to read the rest of the essay.
- If you include any quote in your essay, you must show how it fits into your work so that your readers understand its relevance.
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What Types of Quotes Can You Include in an Essay?
You can use direct, summary, or paraphrase quotes in the introduction of your essay.
- A direct quote contains all the words of a speaker. You should write it exactly as it is.
- Paraphrased quotes are reworded statements written in your own words without changing the intended meaning.
- A summary quote is one written in brief, and it retains the message of the original quote.
You can use any type of quote in your essay. Just make sure you don’t interfere with its original meaning as intended by its author.
How to Choose a Good Quote to Start an Essay
Here’s how you can find the best quote to start any type of essay:
1. Choose a Quote Relevant to the Topic
Read the essay prompt to understand the nature of the assignment.
The first few minutes of going through the assignment brief should make it easy to choose a quote that’s relevant to the central theme of the topic.
Also, ensure that the quote is memorable because it will retain readers’ attention and give them the interest to read the rest of the essay.
2. Get Your Quote from a Credible Source
It’s easy to brainstorm and make up your own quotes.
Such quotes can be interesting enough to draw attention, but they won’t fit in an academic essay because they’re your own thoughts.
The quote you choose to start an essay with should come from a credible scholarly source.
If your teacher asks you where you got the quote from and you tell them you made it up, they’ll more than likely not read the essay past the introduction.
3. Use Clear, Short Quotes
It doesn’t make sense to start an essay with a long quote that a reader will struggle to remember.
Even if a quote is interesting enough to fit the central theme of the essay prompt, you should avoid it in favor of a short, clear quote.
If a reader can memorize the quote within the first 30 seconds of reading, go for it.
Such a quote is good for your essay because it enhances clarity, making it easy for the reader to understand the meaning and support for your argument.
4. You Should Explain the Significance of the Quote
If you choose to start your essay with a quote, don’t explain to explain its significance in the paper.
There are two advantages to doing this.
First, explaining a quote further helps to strengthen your essay. Second, more explanation enables you to present the clarity so you don’t lose a reader, not to mention make your content easy to understand.
5. You Should Provide Relevant Reference to the Quote
Since a quote is someone else’s thoughts, you need to attribute it to the right author.
Besides, your readers will want to know where you got the quote from, and you must make it easy for them to find it.
When Not to Start an Essay with a Quote
Some students prefer to start their essays with quotes because they find the phrases engaging, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But purpose-written opening sentences tend to have a broader latitude than quotes, and therefore more powerful than the latter.
Again, quotes communicate someone else’s thoughts so much so that they tend to undermine your creativity. So it’s best to shy away from them if you have something more engaging and enlightening to share with your readers.
There’s also the problem of limited range of expression, as you don’t have the room to expand on another author’s quotations besides summarizing or paraphrasing it.
Because quotes require attribution, they can cause a reader to look aside, so you risk losing their attention during that first moment with your writing.
Final Thoughts on Starting an Essay with a Quote
If one thing is for sure, it’s that’s you can start a great essay with a quote relevant to the theme of the topic. As long as you can find and attribute great quotes, you’ll be set and ready to write an essay that your instructor will find interesting to read.
However, if you want more freedom to express your thoughts and share something more enlightening with your target readers, then there’s no point starting your essay with a quote.
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