One of the biggest challenges that my students face is how to write a scholarly introduction to their papers and assignments. I’m not entirely sure of the reasons that students struggle with writing introductions, but it is the area that I find myself often providing help. There are many excellence resources on how to write a scholarly introduction and my personal favorite is Wendy Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing. In today’s post, I’m going to modify some of Belcher’s advice with my own to provide five easy steps for writing a scholarly introduction.

Fundamentally, the role of an introduction is to provide the necessary information for your reader to understand your argument. This sets up your argument for your reader.

Unlike fiction or other types of writing, the element of surprise is not a part of academic writing. From the outset, you want to explain your argument and the relevant information so your reader understands where you’re going with the paper.

The introduction is the most important part of an academic paper. If you lose your reader in the introduction, you are unlikely to ever get them back. The introduction has to accomplish a number of goals, but the following five steps will help you write a killer introduction.

1. Capture your reader’s attention starting with the first sentence. Right from the beginning, you need to draw your reader into your paper. Nothing can do this better than a compelling, vivid first sentence. Unfortunately, many first sentences suffer from cliches and boring writing. Belcher identifies a few ways to begin and I highlight my favorites here.

• Subject opening. Describe in clear and compelling terms the subject of your paper.
• Critical opening. Describe the problems and limitations of current research.
• Significance opening. Describe the compelling significance of your topic for the reader.
• Historical opening. Put your topic in historical context, but again beware of cliches and overgeneralization.

2. Clearly state your argument. This is another area where my students struggle. Many times, student arguments are implicit requiring the reader to pull out the relevant pieces to identify the argument. Also, the arguments are often timid and largely state the obvious. I encourage my students to try two approaches to writing stronger arguments. First, write an absurd exaggeration of your argument (frequently, this will not be absurd and is their actual argument just more strongly stated. I have them use this version instead of their own). Second, can you say “No, you’re wrong.” If someone can’t argue that you’re wrong, you don’t have a strong enough argument.

After coming up with your argument, you need to clearly state it in your introduction. It also doesn’t have to be at the end of your introduction as we’ve been taught since 9th grade English. But, it should be obvious what your argument is because it is the centerpiece of your introduction.

3. Explain how your work and argument fits into the larger scholarly conversation. This is an area that almost no students do in their introduction. I believe this is because students don’t feel comfortable considering themselves part of the research community. Our goal as instructors should be to help them start to think of themselves this way. In the introduction, your work must be put into the context of the larger research conversation. You aren’t the first one discussing the topic. You’re aren’t the only one discussing a topic. The introduction explains how your paper fits into this conversation and contributes to scholarship.

4. What is the basis for your claims and arguments? Many class papers do not have methodology sections so this is an area that often gets ignored. Yet, the introduction still needs to establish the author’s expertise to write the paper. In a paper with empirical data, this could be as simple as briefly describing the methods of the study. For many class papers, this will often include a description of the texts and documents used to come up with the evidence to support the claims made in the paper.

5. Provide the context for your paper. Students often feel the need to include relevant statistics and definitions in their introduction. Although you can obviously go overboard on this, I do believe the last step of the introduction is providing some context for your paper which may include definitions and other context-setting information. This is also where you can set the boundaries of what you are and are not going to address in the paper. A paragraph that provides information such as a summary of the structure of the paper or clarifying key concepts can be useful.

In general, an introduction will run about 1/12 of the total length of the paper. You can do more or less, but that’s a decent rule of thumb. You’ll need that much space to accomplish the five steps that I’ve laid out here. I hope they help you know how to write a scholarly introduction.

Question: If you have questions or other advice, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. You can leave a comment by clicking here.