Paragraph starters: 160 ways to start a paragraph, sorted by job

Paragraph starters are the opening words of a paragraph's first sentence, the topic sentence. A good one does two jobs at once: it links the new paragraph to the one before, and it tells the reader what this paragraph will prove. The 160 below are sorted by the paragraph's job, from the introduction to the conclusion, and each one is shown inside a full topic sentence so you can see the whole move.

They work at a larger scale than sentence starters, which are single words and phrases such as However or For example. A paragraph starter is the frame of a whole claim (A second reason the canal failed is that…), and it tells the reader what job this paragraph does in your argument. When the hard part is carrying one particular idea into the next, the transition sentences are sorted by the relationship between the two.

The difference shows when you read a draft's first sentences on their own. Here are the openings of five paragraphs from the body and conclusion of a short essay arguing that a city should keep its night bus, before and after revision.

The before version names topics and leaves the reader to guess what each paragraph will do. In the after version, each opening names a different job, and each is adapted from a starter in the list below (its number is in parentheses):

• The first reason to keep the night bus is that (25) opens the first body paragraph with the first piece of the thesis.
• Just as important as who rides it is (43) adds a point and ties it to the last one: from who rides to where they go.
• The strongest argument against the bus is (115) signals the counterargument before the objection arrives.
• That argument ignores (124) opens the rebuttal by naming the objection it answers.
• The night bus, then, (145) opens the conclusion with what the evidence adds up to.

Find the job in the table, borrow the frame in bold, and put your own subject in the rest of the sentence.

Introduction paragraph starters

For the paragraph that opens an essay, a report or a chapter. It moves from the subject to your claim; for single opening lines, see these essay hook examples.

1. The question sounds simple: who should pay to repair a bridge that two counties share?
2. Ask ten editors what a style guide is for and you will get ten answers, most of them about commas.
3. Few novels open as quietly as Middlemarch, whose prelude is about a sixteenth-century saint.
4. When the Dunmore library cut its evening hours in 2024, the people who complained were not the ones the board expected.
5. It is easy to assume that remote teams write less than office teams; one company's message logs suggest the opposite.
6. This essay begins with a single letter, written in 1862 by a soldier who never mailed it, and asks why his family kept it for a century.
7. The debate over four-day school weeks has mostly been about money; it should be about what happens on the fifth day.
8. At first glance, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about a room.
9. Two facts frame this report: the clinic's waiting list doubled in a year, and its staff did not change.
10. Anyone who has moved house knows the box that never gets unpacked; city archives have whole rooms of them.
11. The familiar explanation for the store's closure is the new highway, but the sales ledgers point to something older.
12. What follows is an argument for keeping the night bus, made on behalf of the people who ride it at 2 a.m.

Background and definition paragraphs

For the paragraph that gives the reader what they need before the argument starts: history, terms, earlier work. In a news feature this job falls to the nut graf.

13. Some history explains why the rule exists: until 1974 the river flooded the lower town every few springs.
14. The term needs pinning down first, because “affordable housing” means one thing to planners and another to tenants.
15. Before the merger, the two newsrooms covered the same council meetings with different reporters and different deadlines.
16. To see why the decision mattered, it helps to know how small the department was: four staff, one van and a budget set in 2009.
17. The basic facts are not in dispute: the shipment left on May 3, arrived on May 19 and was eleven crates short.
18. In this report, “late” means any delivery that arrives more than a day after the date on the order.
19. Earlier work on the question falls into two camps: studies of cost and studies of attendance, which rarely cite each other.
20. The policy itself is only two sentences long, and both of them leave room for interpretation.
21. Readers who know the first novel can skip ahead; for everyone else, here is where the sequel begins.
22. Three terms recur in what follows, and each needs a working definition.
23. The setting matters more than it first appears: Moby-Dick spends its first chapters ashore in New Bedford and Nantucket before the Pequod sails.
24. A short timeline helps here: the petition went out in March, the hearing came in June, and the vote followed the plant's layoff notice by a week.

First body paragraph starters

The first body paragraph carries the first piece of the thesis. Name that piece plainly, so the reader can see the plan; the thesis statement examples show claims built to be split this way.

25. The first reason to keep the night bus is that, for many riders, there is no second option.
26. The clearest evidence for this reading comes from the opening chapter, where Pip meets the convict among the gravestones.
27. The problem starts with the forms themselves: applicants must give the same address on three different pages.
28. The simplest case for the merger is financial: the two newsrooms were paying for the same wire service twice.
29. Start with what the archive actually holds: 412 letters, most of them from the last two years of the war.
30. Gatsby's parties are the place to begin, because they show what he wants before anyone in the novel says it aloud.
31. The most direct effect of the new schedule was on the night shift, which lost a third of its staff.
32. Consider first who uses the reading room on a weekday: retirees in the morning, students after three and almost no one in between.
33. In its first year, the program did exactly what it promised: 214 people finished the course, against a target of 200.
34. The case against the dam begins upstream, with the farms that would lose their water rights.
35. On the question of cost, the numbers favor the smaller plan, which would cost a third as much and open two years sooner.
36. The narrator's first lie comes on page one, and it is a small one: she says she has never been to the coast.
37. Of the three changes the council proposed, the parking rule would affect the most people.
38. The shortest way into the poem is through its title, which names a season the poem never describes.

Starters for adding a point

For the second, third and fourth body paragraphs. The opener should say how the new point relates to the last one: another reason, a bigger one, a different kind.

39. A second reason the canal failed is that the railway reached the town four years after it opened.
40. Beyond the cost, there is the matter of time: the smaller plan opens in 2027, the larger one in 2031.
41. If the forms are the first barrier, the office hours are the second: the clinic closes at four.
42. The same pattern appears in the letters, where the writer apologizes in almost every paragraph.
43. Just as important as who rides the night bus is where they are going: two-thirds of trips end at a hospital or a warehouse.
44. A further problem with the survey is its timing: it ran in the week of a public holiday.
45. The interviews point the same way: eleven of the twelve staff named the night shift first.
46. Money is only part of it; the program also changed who felt welcome in the building.
47. The third and strongest reason is that the dam would not solve the problem it was built for.
48. Alongside the economic case runs a moral one: the town promised the farmers their water in 1952.
49. More revealing than the parties is Gatsby's library, where the books are real but the pages are uncut.
50. The design flaw also explains the second accident, which happened on a dry day.
51. A related change, less noticed at the time, was the move of the bus depot to the edge of town.
52. This is not the only place the narrator's account slips; the dates in chapter four don't add up either.
53. What the budget shows, the staff rotas confirm: the evening shift was cut first and hardest.
54. The novel returns to the green light in its final paragraphs, where it stands for a future that keeps receding.
55. There is a practical side to this as well: the old system needed a technician on site every night.
56. The final piece of evidence is also the simplest: nobody has used the east entrance since 2019.

Starters for contrast and turns

For the paragraph that changes direction: a different case, an exception, a result that cuts against the last one. Put the turn in the first words, so the reader isn't surprised halfway through.

57. The rural branches tell a different story: their evening visits went up after the cuts.
58. Not every critic has read the ending as hopeful; for some, the wedding is a surrender.
59. The second survey reached the opposite conclusion, and it asked twice as many people.
60. Against this success stands one stubborn number: the dropout rate, which did not move.
61. None of this was true of the smaller plant, which kept its night shift and its customers.
62. Where the first edition ends with a wedding, the revised one ends with a funeral.
63. The picture changes once the evening data are included: the busiest hour is not noon but 9 p.m.
64. The letters are less certain than the official report. Twice the writer admits she is guessing.
65. For the farmers, the dam looks very different: less a reservoir than a fence.
66. Pip's view of Joe is the reverse of the reader's; the more Pip is ashamed of him, the better Joe looks.
67. Yet the same council that cut the bus route voted that month to widen the highway.
68. That explanation fits the city data, but it fails in the suburbs, where prices fell.
69. The opposite happened in Ferris County, where the mill stayed open and the population still fell.
70. Here the comparison breaks down: the second town never had a railway to lose.
71. What the managers described in interviews is not what the logs show. The logs show overtime every week.
72. Darcy's letter turns the novel around: after it, Elizabeth starts to doubt her own judgment instead of his.

Example and case paragraphs

For a paragraph built around one case: a person, a place, a scene, a single document. Name the case in the first sentence and say what it is a case of.

73. Take one rider: a nurse who finishes her shift at 1 a.m. and lives eleven miles from the hospital.
74. The lock keeper's diary shows the decline year by year, from forty boats a week in 1890 to six in 1902.
75. One scene captures the marriage in miniature: the honeymoon in Rome, where Dorothea weeps alone.
76. A small bakery on Fenn Street shows how the rule works in practice.
77. The clearest case is the 2022 storm, when the old warning system sent no alerts at all.
78. What this looks like on the page is easiest to see in one paragraph from the second draft.
79. Take the opening of A Tale of Two Cities, where clause after clause pairs an idea with its opposite.
80. A single invoice makes the problem concrete: $14,200 for a contract the board never approved.
81. Maria Ortega's first week in the program is typical. She filled in the same form three times.
82. The 9:40 from Kessling is a good example: it ran late on four days out of five last winter.
83. Nowhere is the pattern clearer than in the hiring records for 2021.
84. Hamlet's play within the play is the textbook case: he stages a murder to watch the king's face.
85. To see the effect on one household, follow the Brennans' water bill over two years.
86. A counterexample is just as useful: the one branch that kept its hours and still lost readers.

Evidence paragraph starters

For a paragraph that brings in data, documents or quotations. Say what the evidence shows first, then give it. A paragraph that opens on a bare number makes the reader guess why it's there.

87. The ridership figures support this: night trips grew every year from 2019 to 2025, even as day trips fell.
88. Court records from the period tell the same story in more detail.
89. The strongest evidence comes from the people who left: of 40 former members interviewed, 31 named the schedule.
90. Two independent sources agree on the date: the parish register and the ship's manifest.
91. The weather records rule out the simplest explanation: it did not rain on any of the three days.
92. What the sales data show is a slow decline, not a collapse.
93. The first test of the claim is the attendance record, and the claim survives it.
94. The interviews add what the numbers cannot: the reasons people gave for staying.
95. A close reading of the lease supports the tenants' view. Clause 9 says “shall,” not “may.”
96. The photographs are more persuasive than any statistic. In 1970 the square is full; in 1990 it is a parking lot.
97. Frankenstein's creature tells us exactly what he read: Paradise Lost, Plutarch's Lives and The Sorrows of Young Werther.
98. Tables 3 and 4 show the effect most clearly.
99. The council's own minutes undercut its explanation.
100. Three kinds of evidence point to the same cause: the logs, the repair invoices and the staff rotas.
101. The best test of a theory is a case it did not predict, and the Ferris County data supply one.
102. The author's drafts confirm the reading: the ending was rewritten twice, each time darker.

Analysis paragraph starters

For the paragraph after the evidence, which says what it means. It's the move the essay format guide calls analysis, and the one drafts often skip.

103. What these numbers suggest is that the night bus is not a convenience but a commute.
104. The pattern matters because it reverses the usual explanation for the decline.
105. Read this way, the ending is less a reward than a warning.
106. The gap between the two accounts is the point: each witness remembers the version that protects them.
107. Why would the narrator lie about something so small?
108. Taken together, the letters show a writer who knew she was being read.
109. The most likely explanation is also the least dramatic: nobody updated the forms after 2015.
110. This changes how the opening chapter reads.
111. It would be easy to take the delay as incompetence; the documents suggest it was a choice.
112. The repetition is doing work: each time the phrase returns, it means a little less.
113. None of this proves the policy failed, but it narrows the reasons it might have.
114. The date makes sense only alongside the second letter, written the same week from the same address.

Counterargument and rebuttal paragraphs

Give the strongest objection a paragraph of its own and state it fairly (115–122), then answer it in the next one (123–130). The argumentative essay examples show three ways to structure the answer.

115. The strongest argument against the night bus is cost per rider, which is four times the daytime figure.
116. Critics of the merger make a fair point about local coverage, which fell by a third.
117. The usual objection to this reading is that it makes the heroine too knowing for her age.
118. A reasonable reader might object that the survey is too small to support any of this.
119. The case for the dam has its own logic, and it deserves a hearing.
120. One objection is harder to dismiss than the rest: the program's graduates earned no more than those who left.
121. Supporters of the old schedule point to its simplicity, and they are right about that.
122. It might seem that the narrator's honesty elsewhere makes this lie unlikely.
123. That objection would hold if the riders had another way home; most do not.
124. The cost argument ignores what the alternative would cost: two ambulance trips a week, by the county's own estimate.
125. This criticism is fair as far as it goes, but it measures the wrong outcome.
126. The sample is small, but it is not unrepresentative: its ages and incomes match the census.
127. Even granting the critics' numbers, the dam would not pay for itself before 2060.
128. The objection assumes we trust the narrator, and the novel has given us no reason to.
129. The simplest answer to the critics is in their own data.
130. Conceding the point about cost does not settle the question, because cost was never the only measure.

Narrative and personal essay paragraphs

For personal essays, memoir, features and narrative nonfiction. A narrative paragraph usually opens on a time, a place or a person rather than a claim.

131. The summer I turned twelve, my grandfather taught me to drive his tractor in a field with nothing in it to hit.
132. By the time we reached the border, it was dark, and the guard had stopped looking at passports.
133. My mother kept every receipt, filed by month in shoeboxes under the stairs.
134. Nobody in the newsroom remembers who first called it the morgue.
135. Three weeks later, the letter came back unopened.
136. The house on Calder Street had one working radiator, and we fought over it all winter.
137. I did not see the ocean until I was nineteen.
138. On the morning of the hearing, the courthouse steps were already crowded with farmers in their good jackets.
139. Years afterward, I asked my brother what he remembered about that night.
140. Every Sunday ran to the same schedule: church, my aunt's kitchen and the long drive home in silence.
141. The first thing you notice at the plant is the smell, a mix of hot metal and burned coffee.
142. That was the last time I saw the farm.
143. Halfway through the interview, Mrs. Adeyemi stopped answering my questions and started asking her own.
144. It took me ten years to understand what she meant.

Conclusion paragraph starters

The first sentence of a conclusion should say what the evidence adds up to, now that the reader has seen it. More on the rest of the paragraph in how to write a conclusion.

145. The night bus, then, is less a service than a lifeline, and cutting it would save less than it costs.
146. What the archive finally shows is a town that argued about the canal for a century and never asked the people who worked it.
147. If the dam cannot pay for itself, deliver the water it promises or keep the town's word to the farmers, there is little left to recommend it.
148. Pip's story ends where it began to go wrong, in the ruined garden of Satis House.
149. None of this means the merger was a mistake; it means it was only half finished.
150. The larger lesson is about measurement: the program succeeded on every count it was given and failed on the one nobody wrote down.
151. Whether the reforms last will depend on the next budget, not the last one.
152. Seen whole, the letters are less a record of the war than of a marriage conducted by mail.
153. For the council, the choice is now narrower than it looked in March.
154. What remains open is whether the pattern holds outside the city.
155. The evidence points to a simple recommendation: keep the route, and pay for it with the money set aside for the highway study.
156. Read again after the ending, the first chapter looks like a confession.
157. The case for the smaller plan rests on three facts the larger plan cannot change: its cost, its timeline and the river.
158. If there is a lesson for other libraries, it is to ask who is in the building at 8 p.m. before cutting the hours.
159. The town will go on arguing about the harbor; it now has better evidence to argue with.
160. In the end, the story is less about the strike than about who got to tell it.

How to write a topic sentence

William Strunk Jr. put the standard advice into one rule in The Elements of Style (1920 edition): “As a rule, begin each paragraph with a topic sentence, end it in conformity with the beginning.” His reason was the reader's. The practice, he wrote, “enables him to discover the purpose of each paragraph as he begins to read it.” A topic sentence is a promise, and the rest of the paragraph keeps it.

1. Make a claim, not an announcement

   “This paragraph is about rents in Dunmore” names a subject. “Rents in Dunmore have risen faster than wages for ten years” makes a claim, and a claim gives the rest of the paragraph something to do: support it.

2. Link back before you move on

   Open with something the reader already has, the last paragraph's point in a few words, and end the sentence on what's new: “If the forms are the first barrier, the office hours are the second.” Readers tend to follow old-to-new order without noticing it; reverse it and the paragraph can feel like a jump. For whole sentences built to bridge two ideas, see the transition sentences.

3. Keep it the size of the paragraph

   “Housing policy has failed” could head a book. A 150-word paragraph can't deliver it. Narrow the claim until the evidence in front of you covers it: one town, one decade, one cause.

4. Tie it to the thesis

   Each body paragraph's topic sentence should read as one piece of the thesis. If you can't say which piece, the paragraph may belong in another essay, or the thesis is missing a part.

5. Revise it after the paragraph is written

   Drafts drift. When the paragraph is done, read its last sentence, then its first. If the end proves something different from what the start promised, rewrite the start. That is what Strunk meant by ending in conformity with the beginning.

Read only the first sentences

Here is a test for any draft longer than a page. Copy the first sentence of every paragraph into a list and read the list on its own, as the night-bus example at the top of this page does. If it reads as a summary of your argument, the openings are doing their jobs. If it reads as a list of topics, or says the same thing twice, look at the openings first: they may announce subjects instead of making claims, or two paragraphs may be doing the same job.

In Strokes, you can ask the Strokes Assistant to list the first sentence of every paragraph in a section, so you can read the list as an outline.

When the first sentences don't add up, plan the order again before you rewrite anything; the essay outline template gives each paragraph a line for its claim.

Mistakes that weaken paragraph openings

• Announcing the topic. “In this paragraph I will…” and “This section discusses…” spend the most important position in the paragraph on a table of contents. State the claim instead.
• Opening on a bare fact or quotation. A number or a quote with no claim before it makes the reader hold it without knowing why. Features and memoir do open on a quote for effect; in an essay, give the point first and the evidence second.
• Counting instead of connecting. Openings such as Firstly, Secondly and Thirdly, or Another… Another… Another…, tell the reader the order but not the relationship. Use the relationship: beyond, more revealing than, if… then the second.
• A signpost the logic doesn't support. A paragraph that opens with However must turn. One that opens with As a result must follow from the last one.
• A bare “This.” “This shows that…” after a long paragraph leaves the reader to guess what “this” is. Add the noun: “This delay,” “This pattern,” “This clause.”
• Promising more than the paragraph delivers. If the topic sentence claims a trend and the paragraph gives one example, narrow the claim or add the evidence.