This is a
somewhat unusual assignment, as most academic papers have thesis statements rather than hooks.
The notion of a "hook" is more typical of journalistic writing, in which you introduce
something intriguing, odd, or startling in order to grab the reader's attention.
If you are focusing onand , your main theme will be Newspeak, the language that is
being created at the Ministry of Truth in order to make any original thought or form of
rebellion impossible.
One possible hook would be suggesting thatis taking
Wittgenstein's notion that the limits of one's language are the limits of one's world, and
applying it to suggest that by limiting language, one can limit people's ability to think, as is
suggested in the following passage:
Don't you see that the
whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime
literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it . . . .
Another possible hook would be to compare Newspeak to the language
of text messaging. Both have a simplified syntactic structure, limited vocabulary, simplified
spelling, and other features in common. In constructing your hook, you might ask if text
messaging (or Twitter) limits thought in the same way as Newspeak does.
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