The Art of Crafting an Enticing Opening Gambit

Abstract

Although its origins lie in the Italian verb gambetto (to trip someone up) and its more common usage in chess refers to making a sacrifice in order to gain an advantage, the metaphorical use of gambit, specifically an opening gambit, refers to the opening sentences of a document, and perhaps also the title, which are intended to ‘hook’ the reader. Such hooking is important because it provides the author with the opportunity to engage the audience. I hope that my opening sentence has similarly hooked your attention!

The range of genres of such gambits is broad, varying from the trivial or mundane (‘previous research has shown that’) through the descriptive (‘in this paper, we …’), to the bibliographical (‘over the last twenty years, huge volumes of research have been published on …’). A gambit could pose a problem, identify an apparent contradiction that the author plans to explore, ask a question, or speculate about the future. Some of these genres are more creative: they seem designed to jolt the reader out of the customary comfort zone and into a new realm where a more sophisticated understanding of a situation can be gleaned. Opening gambits thus have, at least potentially, immense epistemic power, but quite what the impact of that application of power will be is never entirely certain. Indeed, different readers may interpret your opening sentence(s) in very different ways. Thus, you may capture the imagination of some readers who instantly want to know more. However, you may simultaneously annoy other readers irredeemably, for instance, if they find your style rebarbative, and still others may wander in a limbo between ‘Ah, that's an intriguing idea but, …’, ‘Hmm, who cares’ and ‘No, I don't think so’.

Since the very first readers of a paper are the editors and reviewers, if they are unimpressed by your opening gambit, they may request or insist that you change it. As Gerhard Schwabe relates,¹ ‘The most difficult genre for me has been curious or provocative questions. Although I liked them, none of them survived the reviewing. … The reviewers asked me to adhere to the norms of scientific writing’. Thus, the open-mindedness of editors and reviewers, and perhaps the cultural values of the journal, also determine the extent to which opening gambits can transcend the mundane, or the putative norms of ‘scientific writing’, whatever that is.

I suggest that creating the opening gambit, and getting it just right so that it entices but does not alienate, is very much an art. In an earlier editorial (Davison 2023), I examined a similar art, that of title crafting, and have also alluded to it in editorials on iconoclasm (Davison 2020), and storytelling (Davison 2016), among others. As Schwabe et al. (2019) observe in an editorial to introduce a special issue of this journal on storytelling, ‘stories can be used to connect people, persuade and inform them’. I suggest that the effectiveness of stories in achieving these outcomes will be enhanced if the opening gambits are themselves persuasive, even alluring. Opening gambits occupy a precise niche in the story: they follow the title and abstract, yet come before a formal problem statement or research questions, before the literature review. Ideally, in my view, the opening gambit in some way expands on the title but does not require references. It provides a unique opportunity for the author to make a personal observation about the phenomenon that will be the focus of the paper. As Gerhard Schwabe notes (above), it may encompass a provocative question, but authors must couch their text in a way that is as accessible as possible to the likely reader and so contain the most essential motivational statement for why the author is here, writing these words, and why the reader should care to read any more.

As an editor, I cherish compulsive opening gambits: I sense their epistemic authority, their persuasive power. Correspondingly, as an author, I take a lot of care when writing opening gambits because I imbue in them the alembicated spirit of the message that I am preparing to write. I hope that people will be inspired by what I write; inspired to do something differently; inspired to reconsider their values; inspired to imagine a different way of being. The opening gambit functions as a door that the author opens to the reader, inviting entrance and engagement.

Although I have referred to genres, illustrating what I mean by an intriguing, challenging or tedious opening gambit is achieved more effectively with examples. In the case of those that I find highly effective, it is safe to cite published papers. In the case of those that I find utterly ineffective, ridiculous, meretricious or inane, it is rather more difficult since I don't want to besmirch the reputation of published authors by lambasting their writing in this way, while rejected papers cannot be cited at all. I cite a few in Table 1 below that I found to be more persuasive to me personally, but I must emphasise that these are very much personal examples and it is entirely reasonable that your perception may be entirely different. I provide a short rationale for including each item on this list.

To conclude, I encourage readers to consider carefully how they may most effectively deploy an opening gambit in their writing that will enhance the likelihood that their ideas will hook the reader and so that their paper will be read. Although some reviewers may seem to be in awe of the norms of scientific writing, which apparently preclude the more inventive opening gambits, I suggest that a more creative approach is probably more effective and I certainly welcome it at the ISJ.