GAMSAT Essay: The Art of Writing a Good Introduction

Writing the introduction is often the toughest part of writing the GAMSAT essay. Pretty often you will find a topic staring at your face in the examination hall, you having some idea of what to write on the subject, yet you are not able to come up with a good enough first sentence. Believe me, this is NOT the writer’s block. This happens just due to the fact that you have not trained yourself into writing good and effective introductory sentences/ beginnings. Yes. You do need to PRACTISE writing good introductions for your GAMSAT essay. You may have heard that before. So the question that is hovering on your mind is “But what is a good introduction? And how can I master the art of writing good introductions?” Well, let us try to answer your question.
The GAMSAT writing section has one single mandate “test the candidate’s ability to develop a logical piece of writing.” To do so, the prime-requisite is a good and effective introduction. The introduction of your GAMSAT essay should clearly and emphatically state your main idea. This main idea is your thesis (idea/proposal/argument), and it is your prerogative to develop the thesis in the rest of the essay and come to a logical conclusion. Does this mean you should begin your GAMSAT essay by stating the thesis? No, not really. The first sentence may be too early to actually state your thesis/main idea. Why not give it some space, some time. Why not arrive at the thesis seamlessly? Thus, if your thesis-statement is reading improves vocabulary, enriches the mind, and enhances creativity, this should preferably be the last sentence of your introductory paragraph, and the body of you essay can be developed from this point onwards to substantiate this idea/thesis.
Thus the clear statement of purpose should be the last and not the first sentence of your introduction. What then, should be the first? Well, the first sentence in the GAMSAT essay should be a hook that actually catches the reader’s attention and makes him interested and or inquisitive enough to carry on reading the rest of the essay. There are several ways in which you can grab the reader’s attention. Some interesting and effective hooks for beginning the GAMSAT essays are:
Personal examples
Quotations/Proverbs
Facts/Statistics
A thought provoking/ rhetorical question
Reference to an event much in news at the moment/in the recent past
A statement that contrasts the thesis
You can use one or more of the above to flag off your essay. You need to determine which is/are the best suited for the particular essay. We will take up each of these hooks in GAMSAT essay writing individually in later write-ups and explore them in detail.