This scares me. It scares me because it offers either no guidance about what should go into those sentences, or, it offers bad advice, suggesting there's little difference between an introduction and an outline.
Rather than hook, sentences, thesis, or outline in paragraph form, I prefer to think of an introduction as a promise: when details are placed in an introduction, an author promises their reader that these topics will be addressed in more detail throughout the essay. Let me describe this in terms of the Six Journalistic Questions.
As I have discussed elsewhere, the Six Journalistic Questions are a powerful tool in determining what goes into an essay and a thesis; this holds true for introductions (and conclusions) as well. This leads me to the first lesson about introductions and the Six Journalistic Questions: if it isn't in the essay, it isn't in the introduction.
Allow me to elaborate. You have the the Six Journalistic Questions that give you the criteria for your essay. Anything in the essay that goes outside of these criteria constitutes a tangent – going beyond the circle of your essay. Placing information in an introduction that is not relevant to your criteria is kind of the opposite: you lead your reader to believe that the scope of the essay is actually broader than it really is.
For example, you're writing an essay about electrical batteries and you drop a sentence into your introduction stating, that
Alessandro Volta invented the first modern electric battery in 1800, building on Luigi Galvani's discoveries regarding electricity.
Seems harmless enough of a statement, and perfectly relevant. And then the rest of the essay only discusses modern batteries or the concept in general. This is bad. Bad because the introduction introduced Alessandro Volta, his battery, and Luigi Galvani (who experimented with frog legs and electricity) into your essay. This then gives readers an expectation these individuals will be addressed in more detail later.
Imagine delivering a presentation on mono-crops, and you place a banana and a potato on a table on the stage. They're there. Everyone can see them. They are relevant and pertinent examples to the topic at hand. But you never do anything about them. They linger on the stage waiting to be included. More importantly, your audience is staring at them wondering when you're going to address them. In the end, their presence is more confusing and distracting than helpful.
The solution is then to check every statement – every detail – made in the introduction against your criteria as outlined in the Six Journalistic Questions. If you can't fit something in, it means you need to either revise your introduction to fit it in, or revise the essay to get it out. If everything fits, then you'll have a more coherent lead to your thesis than a chain of topic sentences and more time to clarify what these topics have in common, properly introducing your subject matter to your reader.
There's a natural outcome of this: the introduction may need to be written last. I once showed a draft to a professor who pointed out my two-sentence introduction. I responded that I needed to figure out what I was writing first. As you work on an essay, ideas will get weeded out and new ones will crop up. Just as you have to revise and write reverse outlines to accommodate the growth that an essay undergoes, you have to monitor the Six Journalistic Questions and make sure the introduction, thesis, and essay do not deviate. If you do so, you’ll be making a promise you can keep.
And then there's conclusions: as it turns out, the same basic rules apply. There are some differences, but I'll address another time.
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