How to Write a Good Introduction
Introductions can be tricky. Because the introduction is the first portion of your essay
that the reader encounters, the stakes are fairly high for your introduction to be
successful. A good introduction presents a broad overview of your topic and your thesis,
and should convince the reader that it is worth their time to actually read the rest of your
essay. Below are some tips that will make writing an introduction a little less daunting,
and help us all to write essays that don’t make our professors want to bang their heads
against the wall.
1. Start your introduction broad, but not too broad. When I first started writing
formal essays, I didn’t really know how broad to go with my intros. A brief
paragraph on Hamlet would suddenly include irrelevant details about
Shakespeare’s childhood, then grow out to be a history of Western literature, and
then a history of the universe itself. Do not write an introduction like this; this kind
of intro is confusing and makes the reader wonder where exactly you’re going
with your essay. Your introduction should provide the reader with a sense of what
they should expect out of your essay, not to expound upon every piece of
knowledge ever developed by man. Go ahead and start relatively broad, then
narrow to your thesis, but make sure you’re still on topic.
2. Provide relevant background, but don’t begin your true argument. It’s fine to
give a bit of context to your essay in the introduction, but the real meat of your
argument should be located in your body paragraphs. A good test to see if
information should go in a body or introductory paragraph is to ask yourself a few
questions. Is this providing context or evidence? Does this introduce my
argument, or try to prove it? True evidence or proof deserves a body paragraph.
Context and background most likely belong in your introduction.
3. Provide a thesis. The majority of the time, your thesis, or main argument, should
occur somewhere towards the end of your introduction. It is a typical convention
to put your thesis as the last sentence of your first paragraph. My personal
opinion is that it can sometimes be awkward to shove your thesis in one specific
place if it doesn’t necessarily fit, but if your thesis works in that position, that is
the best place for it. That being said, if you absolutely can’t include your thesis in
that location, go ahead and stick it somewhere else.
4. Provide only helpful, relevant information. Anecdotes can be an interesting
opener to your essay, but only if the anecdote in question is truly relevant to your
topic. Are you writing an essay about Maya Angelou? An anecdote about her
childhood might be relevant, and even charming. Are you writing an essay about
safety regulations in roller coasters? Go ahead and add an anecdote about a
person who was injured while riding a roller coaster. Are you writing an essay
about Moby Dick? Perhaps an anecdote about that time your friend read Moby
Dick and hated it is not the best way to go. The same is true for statistics, quotes,
and other types of information about your topic.
5. Try to avoid clichés. Some types of introductions may have once been
successful, but have been used so often that they have become tired and
clichéd. Starting your essay with a definition is a good example of one of these
conventions. At this point, starting with a definition is a bit boring, and will cause
your reader to tune out.
6. Don’t feel pressured to write your intro first. Sometimes it can be difficult to
figure out exactly what information is relevant to your introduction until you’ve
written the piece itself. Personally, I find that my writer’s block is always strongest
when writing the introduction. If you are having trouble with your intro, feel free to
write some, or all, of your body paragraphs, and then come back to it. You might
find it a bit easier to write your introduction once you’re more comfortable with the
essay as a whole.
7. Convince the reader that your essay is worth reading. Your reader should
finish the introduction thinking that the essay is interesting or has some sort of
relevance to their lives. A good introduction is engaging; it gets the audience
thinking about the topic at hand and wondering how you will be proving your
argument. Good ways to convince your reader that your essay is worthwhile is to
provide information that the reader might question or disagree with. Once they
are thinking about the topic, and wondering why you hold your position, they are
more likely to be engaged in the rest of the essay.
Basically, a good introduction provides the reader with a brief overview of your topic and
an explanation of your thesis. A good introduction is fresh, engaging, and interesting.
Successful introductions don’t rely on clichés or irrelevant information to demonstrate
their point. Be brief, be concise, be engaging. Good luck.
The background study is a compilation of sufficient information based on the analysis
of your proposed argument or problem and the steps required to arrive at the design
and implementation of feasible solutions and the results achieved. Thus background
study is the work you did to determine this is a problem, these are the methods required
to solve this problem and this and that is the purpose of any method or experiment
used. background study requires research and proper interpretation of the research as
well as citation backing the research done. A way to write a background study is shown
below:
1. first you should give a general overview of the thesis topic and introduce the
pivoting ideas you will be using throughout the thesis. this should take a
paragraph.
2. Then you provide detailed, precise information about the methodologies
researched. depending on individual and thesis topic, this could take several
paragraphs
3. To avoid plagiarism, cite your sources and resources
4. introduce your experiment after this by briefly describing the methodology used
and the objective of this methodology. in other words, why this method and not
the other?
Literature review is normally chapter two, and is a study of other people's work in the
field/ topic you are researching on. Your work is not 100% your creation. it is an
improvement of so many other people's work. Literature review is a way of showing you
are not repeating what has already been done but that you are improving on what is
already obtainable.
A Background chapter is best used to present contextual or prerequisite information that
is important or essential to understand the main body of your thesis. Perhaps there
were some historical developments that set the stage for your research questions or
thesis. Perhaps there was some debate over key terms or scope of your subfield.
Perhaps you are bringing together several disciplines, and you need to explain which
aspects of each discipline you are including and not including.
A Literature Review chapter builds a conceptual structure that ties together all the key
ideas from all the relevant literature. By "conceptual structure" I mean an organized way
of linking individual ideas together so that their relative importance and interrelations are
clear and obvious to the reader. What are the main ideas? What ideas support these
main ideas? What are the contradictory ideas? On what basis to people decide what
ideas or positions to support or oppose?
Viewed this way, what becomes clear is that a Literature Review chapter is less about
"literature" and instead is mostly about "review".
Literature review is usually longer and it can be a whole work/article or a part of a
thesis. Background section is usually short and the first part of research article.
For literature review you should thoroughly go through all available studies, assess the
important findings in them, discuss them and find some relevance for them. Poor
reviews usually list the available studies and their findings. You can hypothesize with
some findings especially if controversy exists. For example do the methodological
differences explain the possible controversy in the findings. You should not make
lengthy or intense speculations since you must stick strictly to the literature available. In
the end of literature review you can give some open questions and warrant further
research if your review have given examples of controversies or examples of lack of
information in the literature.
The background section of a journal article should briefly describe what is reported in
the literature so far. Usually you should be able to present some kind absence or need
of certain information or a controversy which you will address in your research. You
could also describe shortly why this lack of information or controversy should be solved.
You should not hypothesize in any way or make assumptions in the background
section. All that should come in the discussion section. Finally, you should only scratch
the surface of the literature and not try establish reasons for different or controversial
findings seen in the previous studies.
Differences between background of the study and literature review can be viewed in
terms of location in the study, purpose, length, and structure.
(1) Location
Background of the study is incorporated in the Introduction chapter (Chapter
1) of the study while literature review makes a separate chapter of the study
(Chapter 2).
(2) Purpose
Incorporating background information into the Introduction is intended to
provide the reader with critical information about the topic being studied, such
as highlighting and expanding upon foundational studies conducted in the past,
important historical events that inform why and in what ways the research
problem is associated. (Research Guides: SHU Library Home: Home)
The purpose of a literature review is to: (Dr. Robert Larabee, Research
Guides) is to locate one's research within the context of existing
literature. Specifically, the review is to -
o Place each work in the context of its contribution to the understanding of the
research problem being studied,
o Describe the relationship of each work to the others under consideration,
o Identify new ways to interpret, and shed light on any gaps in previous
research,
o Resolve conflicts among seemingly contradictory previous studies,
o Identify areas of prior scholarship to prevent duplication of effort,
o Point the way in fulfilling a need for additional research, and
(3) Length
Background is usually short. One should only scratch the surface of the
literature and not try to establish reasons for different or controversial findings
seen in the previous studies. The review of literature is much longer which
information provides the reader with more than just
the essential context needed to understand the research problem and its
significance which the background is supposed to do.
(4) Structure
The background study’s structure is historical. Ideally, the study should
effectively set forth the history and background information on the thesis
problem.
The structure of a literature review is conceptual. The chapter ties together
all the key ideas from all relevant literature to theory to concepts to the
research problem. It links individual ideas together so that their relative
importance and interrelations are clear and obvious to the reader.
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Justin Schwartz, Lawyer, ex-law professor and -philosophy professor, refugee from
BigLaw, independent scholar, idiosyncratic...
Answered Mar 31, 2016 · Author has 6.4k answers and 4.2m answer views
Originally Answered: Theses and Dissertations: What is the difference between
background of study and literature review?
I'd ask my advisers what they expected. I have written a master's thesis and a
PhD dissertation, and at good institutions and programs (Cambridge, MPhil, Michigan,
PhD), and was never told that these parts of the submissions were required, much less
marked. Generally it's expected that you show you know the literature in your field in
your topic, and that's what a literature review is. I did this in both of my thesis not by
having a separate section, but by discussing the important literature, or explaining why I
wasn't going to discuss certain important contributions.
I would guess a background of study would locate your thesis in the context of the field
and related fields, explaining why what you had to say was important and original
(normally it's a requirement of a thesis that it make an "original contribution to
scholarship"). Again, I did this in my doctoral dissertation by saying, this thesis a
contribution to a large topic on which there is a standard position with a fork. I reject the
assumption that requires the fork, and therefore both times of the fork, and show that
there is alternative way of framing the issues. But ask your advisers. They seem to have
something specific in mind, as mine did not.
