How to start a speech, an essay, a comment of a tweet: Offer Advice.

You can advise the audience what to expect.

Why not try one of these five alternatives?

Praise:

I always like coming onto this blog because of the quality of the posts. Let me explain….

Friends, Romans, Countrymen! Lend me your ears! I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him!

Blame:

I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News is meant for all men...? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that He died for them?

...The Vietnamese people proclaimed their independence in 1945...

Martin Luther King, the great American speaker speaking in the Riverside Church, Now York April 1967 on the subject of the Vietnamese War. He went on to blame the US government and “ a far deeper malady within the American Spirit.”

Exhortation:

We are in Seattle arguing for a world trade system that puts basic human rights and the environment at its core. We have the most powerful corporations of the world ranged against us. Tyhey own the media that informs us – or fails to inform us. And they probably own the politicians too. It's enough to make anybody feel a little edgy.
So here's a question for the world trade negotiators...

Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop addressing the International Forum on Globalisation, Seattle 27^th November 1999.

Dissuasion:

In March 1985 Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter made a trip together to Istanbul. At the time, they were perhaps the two most important names in world theatre, but unfortunately it was not a play of literary event that brought them to Istanbul, but the limits being set on freedom of expression in Turkey...

Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist at the World Voices Festival in New York 25th April 2006. He was trying to dissuade the audience from suppressing unpopular ideas.

Appealing to the audience:

General MacArthur had been a colourful and very successful General in the Second World War. After it he had more or less ruled Japan as a military Shogun. When he addressed Congress in 1951, they did not approve of military government. So he was on the back foot. Here is how he started the speech which led to generous applause:

I address you with neither rancour nor bitterness in the fading twilight of life. The issues are global and so interlocked that to consider the problems of one sector, oblivious to those of another, is but to court disaster for the whole.
While Asia is commonly referred to as the Gateway to Europe...

These starts are excellent for speeches – weddings, funerals, politics, presentations.

They do not work for Exam Essays though. And for Tweets which are very short, they waste space. Comments on blogs – don't you always dread it when they go on and on and on? So I don't use them on comments myself.