文书和考试写作都可以模仿下文章开头方式

9月的时候NYT 写了个命题作文，要求专栏作家们What is school for？为话题写文章。

因为这个话题的普世性，所以从这个专题里面其实能提炼很多的考试相关的语料。

但这次要总结的还不是考试语料的部分，而是从这个同一个话题的文章里面，我们可以来综述下文章开头可以有的方式。

广义上来说开头要作者三个功能 1. 吸引读者 2. 引入话题 3. 表明态度

对于考试来说 1.吸引读者 这个部分可以忽略，因为你的读者一定会读你的文章。所以如果你是进来准备考试写作模范的，下面的例子主要模仿2/3 部分就好。

但是NYT 文章毕竟还是消费级别的，所以需要做到内容对于读者是有吸引力。一般吸引读者的终极标准是让内容对于读者有“价值”。制造“价值”的方式一般是制造矛盾，打破读者普遍已有的观点，你想一下当你看到权威报纸发表的一篇文章的观点有你已有的有不同的时候，你是不是去读这篇文章的概率会高很多。

所以开头比较常见的一种方式是制造观点矛盾，

比如

呈现格式

题目 ｜作者

文章开头段落

#例子1

School Is for Social Mobility ｜ By John N. Friedman

America is often hailed as a land of opportunity, a place where all children, no matter their family background, have the chance to succeed. Data measuring how low-income children tend to fare in adulthood, however, suggest this may be more myth than reality.

Less than one in 13 children born into poverty in the United States will go on to hold a high-income job in adulthood; the odds are far longer for Black men born into poverty, at one in 40.

上面这个文章制造了一个常识观点（often）和数据显示之间的矛盾

#例子2

School Is for Learning to Read ｜ By Emily Hanford

The most important thing schools can do is teach children how to read. If you can read, you can learn anything. If you can’t, almost everything in school is difficult. Word problems. Test directions. Biology homework. Everything comes back to reading.

But a lot of schools aren’t teaching children how to read. It came as a shock to Corinne Adams. “Public school should be this sacred trust between the community and the school,” she told me. “I’m going to give you my child, and you’re going to teach him how to read. And that shattered for me. That was broken.”

这个文章制造了“学校能做的最重要的事情是教学生阅读能力”和“学校教不好阅读能力”之间的矛盾

#例子3

School Is for Connecting to Nature ｜ By Nicolette Sowder

Throughout the first five years of my older daughter’s life, I watched her dance through the clover, climb trees, puddle jump and play her way through the day. As she stood on the threshold to kindergarten, I pictured her stuck inside at a desk, cut off from her relationship to the wild, and my stomach sank. I believe that school is for nurturing children’s innate talents and helping them figure out where those gifts, necessarily diverse, fit in the whole. The school system, by contrast, tends to produce a monoculture. Despite the heroic efforts of many thoughtful, caring teachers, public school mostly prepares children to be obedient workers and fails millions of students who don’t fit the mold.

作者对于学校的期待和学校的实际情况之间的矛盾

下面这个例子也是用观点冲突的方式引入文章，不同的是在大的框架上用了一个“设问”的结构

#例子4

School Is for Making Citizens ｜ By Heather C. McGhee and Victor Ray

Why do we have public schools? To make young people into educated, productive adults, of course. But public schools are also for making Americans. Thus, public education requires lessons about history — the American spirit and its civics — and also contact with and context about other Americans: who we are and what has made us.

由态度引申出来的是一种作者直接表达自己态度的文章开头方式（一般这么操作的文章都是作者态度本身比较标新立异的，所以大的范畴上其实也是制造矛盾）

比如

# 例子5

School Is for Wasting Time and Money ｜ By Bryan Caplan

I have deep doubts about the intellectual and social value of schooling. My argument in a nutshell: First, everyone leaves school eventually. Second, most of what you learn in school doesn’t matter after graduation. Third, human beings soon forget knowledge they rarely use.

可以看到作者直接表明的自己的态度，但仔细看其实也有个矛盾在，因为作者的态度本身是对于已有态度（the intellectual and social value of schooling）的一个否定（doubt）

这种“开门见山，直抒胸臆”的文章开头方式比较适合考试写作

矛盾当然不见的非得通过观点的冲突来制造，也可以根据时间的冲突，比如下面这个

# 例子6

School Is for Everyone ｜ By Anya Kamenetz

For the majority of human history, most people didn’t go to school. Formal education was a privilege for the Alexander the Greats of the world, who could hire Aristotles as private tutors.

Starting in the mid-19th century, the United States began to establish truly universal, compulsory education. It was a social compact: The state provides public schools that are free and open to all. And children, for most of their childhood, are required to receive an education. Today, nine out of 10 do so in public schools.

历史上 vs. 后来，引入教育越来越大众化的观点。

制造矛盾的方式，也可以是通过故事

比如

# 例子7

School Is for Merit ｜ By Asra Q. Nomani

In 1982, as a 5-foot-0 teen at Morgantown High School in the foothills of West Virginia’s Appalachians, I stepped forward at our annual sports award ceremony to claim an honor: female athlete with the highest G.P.A. A boy named Michael Roh, who won the male athlete award, towered over me at 6-foot-6. He’d been my academic rival since middle school. But on this day, we both smiled. We had both ascended based on hard work and merit.

It was America’s public school system and its culture of meritocracy that allowed me, an immigrant girl from India who arrived at age 4 not knowing a word of English, to become a reporter for The Wall Street Journal at age 23. But now, as my high school classmates and I mark 40 years since graduation, a war on merit is raging. We can’t afford to lose this ideal. The price would be too steep for our nation’s competitive place in the world and, more important, for our nation’s kids, who thrive when they are challenged and motivated to work hard and aim high.

开头的矛盾有两个层次的制造，一个是第一段故事里的girl 和boy：是对手们，但是那天都很开心，因为两人得凭着自己的能力接受肯定。

第二段矛盾继续，开始说，这种每件事情都争抢的心态，对于社会和国家来说也会有负面的效果。

# 例子8

School Is for Hope ｜ By Gabrielle Oliveira

It was a cold day in January 2019, and Heidi, who was 6 years old, was ready for her first day of school in the United States. Her father, Jorge, woke up early to help her with her hair and pack her lunch. Jorge and Heidi had migrated from Guatemala to the United States in 2018. (I am using their first names only because of their vulnerable and changing immigration status.) Upon arrival at the Mexico-U.S. border, they were separated. For more than two months Jorge was in Texas while his daughter was 1,700 miles away in New York City.

Like many immigrant parents, Jorge’s greatest goal is to provide a better life for Heidi. And like many immigrant parents, he believes that American schools promise Heidi the opportunity for that better life. For Jorge, after the hardship of the journey north and the trauma of family separation, school offers hope.

上面的这个开头也是用故事引入，准确的说到不是引入了矛盾，更像是引入了冲突，但宽泛意义上来说，制造了一个情绪上的矛盾

下面这个例子也是用故事的方式开头，冲突的制造没有特别强烈，更多是时间上的对比。

# 例子9

School Is for Care ｜ By Jessica Grose

Kimberly Wilson’s TikTok videos often begin with the back of a little girl’s head. The child’s hair is matted, and Wilson, who works at Butcher-Greene Elementary in Grandview, Mo., begins to gently comb out the snarls. By the end of the videos, which tend to be just a minute or two long, the girl’s hair has been transformed into a beautiful braided style, often with colorful bows adorning it.

Wilson, who posts under the handle @ms.honey.vibes, is careful to obscure the children’s identities and never shares specific details of their struggles. Butcher-Greene is a Title I school, which means that it receives federal assistance because a high number of its students come from low-income families. Over 80 percent of its nearly 300 students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

以上几种方式核心点都是通过制造冲突/矛盾，给读者提供有价值的信息。如果叙事能力强的可以模仿着故事开头下（这种形式比较适合申请的文书）；而对于考试来说，比较好的就是上面提到的一上来就抛出态度的方式：干净。