I've been guilty of writing papers like that I don't know how many times. It's easy--when you don't know what your point really is, just start with a sweeping generalization. The trick, I guess, is to catch it in editing and replace it with something meaningful.

Someone's getting cranky with their marking!

I call this the "Throughout the Ages" introduction.

"Throught the ages, mankind has gathered around the campfires, looked up at the stars, and wondered about [insert topic here]."

Examining blog posts *throughout* the *centuries* and across *civilizations*, there are not *many* that are as accurate in pinpointing an *often* frequent problem in undergraduate *society* as Matt's post about the *history* of students over-reaching for significance in introductory thesis statements.

I alternately call them "since the beginning of time" or "men are from Mars" introductions. I like the "Cecille B. deMille syndrome," but I can't shake the idea that my students will never have heard of him....

I call them "since the beginning of time" papers, too... I've been relatively free of them, but my poor philosopher friends get them all the time.

The other day I edited a friend's paper on education in China; she had had someone else look at the first couple of pages, but he'd run out of time or something, so the beginning was double-edited. He had changed her "since the beginning of time" to "since time immemorial."

Working as a writing advisor, I see this all the time. Every time I make a comment about theses, I emphasize the importance of specificity and directness over universality. And in advising introductions, I recommend concision; clarity; and, again, specificity, often telling students to cut down drastically on the background information they provide.

However, this is how I was trained to write. In high school, we learned the (in)famous 5-essay format, with the triangle introduction and conclusion and the rectangle body paragraphs. Start out your introduction with some sort of generalization; then, work your way towards your specific argument. Do the opposite for the conclusion. Unfortunately, this approach doesn't work very well in academia, where we are writing for a specific audience who already has a good idea of the subject.

i still write like this, and i really am not into changing any time soon, but unlike 'for all time', i'm inclined to say, 'when aristotle noted'. There is important work about stating the view of the many, the doxa, and then performing some work with it. for me, done well, it unveils/deconstructs/contextualizes aspects, structures, institutions, influences, or otherwise. This is not to say that it cannot be done poorly, it is to say that, while irritating and redundant, it is probably serving some purpose in the students mind, providing a bulwark, or context, or understanding and perhaps indicating just what they are not willing to speak of ala wittgenstein or dumezil.

beyond this, i think there is also a tendency to ask our students to write like we would write as professional academics. for most students, this is wrong, it won't serve their lifecourse or really add at all to anything they want to do. specificity is a symptom of this. students need to know argument and evidence, but they don't need to know that when we reduce Treasure Island to symbolic logic the author makes a transposition error on page 39 according to smyth et. al. or whatever. There are many faults with academic styles of writing in the real world, and we have to be careful. The one way i've been somewhat successful in overcoming this is to ask students to stipulate their audience and to describe how the audience will interact (there are innumerable theoretical descriptions here, i know) with their work and to then consider how this might change how they write. Through this, i've found that when some students write ala demille, it is because they are aiming for a certain audience that might be inclined to believe it.

Jeremy makes a good point -- I let one of my students get away with a DeMille-esque intro basically saying "We all believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way" because her audience was readers of a parenting magazine and she says (from research) that the articles generally start that way.

My rule of thumb on such beginnings: if a vast generalization is not a contestable point, or in the service of one, it doesn't help.

I call it the "where's my pen?" opening.

help who?