The windows mirror your face. No one answers. You open timidly. You find that you are on a movie set, that the door goes to the open space you could have entered by any other kind of door. But because I tricked you, you will not forget this doorway, ever.
Beginnings are flexible.
Understandably the few who have written about them have been unsystematic and anecdotal, like chefs who will not share their real secrets, but list ingredients for all recipes in the first chapter and then never specify the amounts for individual recipes. When they do specify, what they recommend, especially in handbooks for beginners, often contradicts the practice of published writers. We should be able to describe what marks the beginnings written by professionals. Towards that end, I have compared the rhetorical opening moves of 20 professionals with those of 20 rank student amateurs. The professionals wrote opening paragraphs to the first five articles in four issues of Psychology Today for 1982.