Movie Trailers

Have you ever watched a movie trailer and been really excited to see the movie, but then you go to the theater and walk out wishing you had your $15 back?  If it was a comedy, they put every joke in the trailer, and the rest was filled with awkward dialogue and little plot.  If it was a horror movie, they put every jump scare and blood curdling scream in the trailer, but overall the movie was underwhelming.  Too often this is the case.  You know why this happens?  Because the directors of the movie trailers got an A in their college rhetoric class.  They are intimately aware of who their audience is and what makes them tick.  They know how to sell movies.  They can make any movie, no matter how mediocre it is a whole, shine in a trailer.  It’s all about knowing your audience and using that information to carefully edit and string together scenes that will get people interested.  It is quite analogous to the introduction to a paper.  That’s where you catch the attention of the reader, and make them want to continue reading.  If the rest of the paper is not well written, they will have the same feeling as you did when you walk out of the movie theater after a bad movie. The most important part of your paper is the introduction, because even if you have a good argument, nobody is going to read it if the intro is not interesting.  However, make sure you don’t have a good intro with no meat in the rest of the paper.