The Hook

Dr. Thibodeau was feared. He was feared because he was one of the toughest professors at our college but you had to take Western Civ and you had to take it from him and you had darn well better go to class because his tests will filled with questions that said, "According to your professor," which mean he  had made a note about something he disagreed with in the text. (He had another phrase we all associate with him, "I'm not making this up," usually delivered after retelling some unbelievable aspect of history.) He was tough. He would stop reading a paper after the third grammatical error. His red pen crucified more than one essay. And his serious demeanour could bring fear to even the cockiest college students. Quite simply, you had to bring your best game with Dr. Thibodeau or suffer badly.

My friends and I worshiped him. We still worship him, carefully ignoring the fact that he was younger than we are now (much younger) when he started scaring students.

I still have the marked up copies of books he made use read, dry tomes that he made sound exciting and scandalous. These books were the crux of his classes and the papers associated with them were like rites of passage for us: do well and earn your spot in his good graces (or at least the feeling that if you could get a good grade out of him you were certainly a genius). As such, we obsessed over these papers, trying to make sure we got all of the information right but that we wrote it in a way that was engaging, intelligent, and error-free.

Patty, my college roommate wrote what I still regard as the best Thibodeau paper ever. It wasn't just that she nailed the content, but she wrote the paper with elements of storytelling, complete with her protagonist and shaping the information so that it remained interesting and ripe with conflict. In this case, it was Caligula and his impact on the Roman empire from sordid behavior to general ineptitude as a leader. What made her paper stand out and make me want to read the whole thing was the hook. Patty started out with this statement (or at least this is what I recall):
Caligula was dead. And the Romans rejoiced.
Who isn't going to want to read that? I loved that she started at the end and shaped her paper to bring the story to explain that end. It was brilliant (and yes, she got a well-deserved A and some rarely-seen gushing praise from Dr. Thibodeau. Also, she holds (still) the highest status of our pack of groupies, none of us able to write something better or get the same praise.

Patty's paper taught me not only how damn hard it was to really, really impress him, but that storytelling and the elements of it are not limited to personal narratives or fiction. In fact, by applying these elements to any kind of work can bring it to life, increase engagement, and yield a solid piece of engaging writing.