Before you dive into the main body of the essay, try one of several tried-and-true methods of revving up the opening. Open your essay with a startling statistic, a fascinating fact, an apt quote or an anecdote in which you recount a little story, not more than a paragraph long. You might also experiment with composing a rhetorical question that will make the reader want to read on. Ideally, it should reference a theme. For example, in an essay on multinational corporations, you might ask a thoughtful question about the boundaries of greed. In some cases, a short poem also makes a compelling opening, but be careful with this: Some people see a poem and just skip over it. Use something accessible, refer to it in the second paragraph to tie it in and keep it short.
No matter how dry the subject matter, any essay becomes more interesting when the writer hones the style as well as at conveying information. Parallelism, strong verbs, colorful detail, brevity, short paragraphs, diction and pace all contribute to compelling style. Parallelism refers to repeated structure at the sentence level. For example, to convert "Jill likes to hunt, fish and to cook," to achieve parallel structure, get rid of the extraneous "to" to form "Jill likes to hunt, fish and cook." Regarding verbs, the first verb you think of is not necessarily your most inspired choice. Compare "All birch leaves come out green in the spring and turn yellow in the fall," to its revised version, "Each spring, all new birch leaves unfurl green and then blaze gold in fall." Keep in mind that professional writers often refer to the verb as the engine of the language.
A step beyond a narrative essay, the flexible lyric essay relies as much on beautiful language, musical sentences, imagery and sensory impression as it does on content development. Often a lyric essay is short but not always. In her essay "To Suffer A Sea of Change," originally published in "The Georgia Review," Peggy Phelan recounts her painful struggle with glaucoma in a lyric narrative essay. Instead of saying, "It's hard to describe the pain," she says, "Words walk to the threshold but will not enter the rooms of the body where pain runs wild." Notice her emphasis on fresh language and the attempt to describe the indescribable; two qualities of lyric poetry. This technique takes practice, but a dedicated writer can master it.
Some writers play with two variations of voice in one piece: the academic, factual voice that uses logical consideration and the meditative voice that uses personal memory. You can alternate from one to the other. For example, Robert Hass, in his essay "One Body: Some Notes on Form" from his collection "Twentieth Century Pleasures" opens with the voice of a lyric essay: "I was walking Kristen to her bus stop --- light blanket of snow after thaw, the air thick with the rusty croaking of blackbirds...," but a few pages later, he has also established the voice of literary critic. Discussing a poem by Randall Jarrell, he says, "The last stanza, in his craftsman's hands, gives the poem a structure, but I do not feel the presence of form. That's why the last line sounds portentous and hollow."