Make it "captivated … as never before".
You want to lure in the reader to continue reading the rest of your essay, making it captivating and intriguing, yet accessible.
Both actors gave very strong performances in the HBO show and were central to its success, but it was McConaughey's brooding, introspective character Rustin Cohle that made it so captivating.
Shot in one take in a break from endless touring and featuring some spotlights, an incredible dance routine and a backwards roll that then morphs into a dry hump, its simplicity is what makes it so captivating.
Being a musical not based on a book or a film, or a film of a book, made it even more captivating.
George R. Stewart, a novelist whose 1936 Donner history "Ordeal by Hunger" has been the standard work for decades, begins by acknowledging just what it is about the situation that makes it so captivating.
The article-as-numbered-list has several features that make it inherently captivating: the headline catches our eye in a stream of content; it positions its subject within a preëxisting category and classification system, like "talented animals"; it spatially organizes the information; and it promises a story that's finite, whose length has been quantified upfront.
That uncertainty does make the process more convoluted, but it also makes it exceptionally captivating for informed citizens, news commentators and political pundits, as second-guessing strategy and tactics are a national pastime.
While Mike's active-duty letters, full of mud and gore, form part of the story, it is Farrington's unsparing account of Lizzie's life at home — the desperately untidy house, her small attempts to carve out time for herself, her mounting anxiety — that takes the novel beyond its particular time and place and makes it a captivating study of tenderness and blame.
I think what also makes it so captivating is that so many written records have survived so we know such a lot about the lives of individual characters.
