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Start with an example. Before diving into the specifics of what's important in an essay introduction, it can be helpful to see an example:
Literary Essay: "Anyone reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula today has seen the conventions of vampire fiction a million times before: the garlic, the mirrors, the bats, a villain who is powerful, cunning, and erotic. There is an ever-growing mythology of vampires that the novel sits near the roots of, and the ubiquity of vampires threatens to make the conventions seem overused and unoriginal – part of the mythological canon. Yet Dracula still terrifies to this day. We can suspend our disbelief because we are in on the action; we’re holding the actual copy of events that Mina typed, being taught with the skeptical Doctor Seward about the very superstitions we too are being asked, while we read, to believe. He conflates the reader and the characters and grounds us in a strange world where science and superstition stand hand in hand. In doing so, Stoker crafts a shockingly modern novel, so that Dracula that feels frightening and new even today because we are never quite sure if it is true. After all, we're reading the same "book" as the main character.