Introductions

The purpose of an introduction is to entice readers into reading the whole paper, and this means knowing who your likely readers will be. When you're writing for a general audience (as a journalist, say) you may have to coax your readers into reading by gaudy details, but this won't work for academic audiences, who will come to your paper already interested in the general subject. Academics will want to know relatively quickly whether your work will help their own research, and they will be far more interested in specifics than generalities. Therefore, start as specifically as you can while still maintaining common ground with your audience; you can get even more specific once you've shown how your argument fits into broader discussions of the work you're analyzing.

Two basic forms of introduction work well in academic introductions, the question-and-answer and the challenge. The question-and-answer form of introduction often does not look like a question -- it very rarely has an actual sentence ending with a question mark -- but it signals an area of inquiry and the thesis provides at least a partial answer. (The introduction to this page is a "question-and-answer" introduction: the implicit question "What makes a good introduction?" is refined into "What kind of introduction appeals to an academic audience?" and is answered with the claim "A specific introduction that makes it clear what will be in the paper appeals to academics"). When someone else has answered a question in a way you disagree with, you can use a "challenge" introduction ("Although Critic X has said Maid Marian plays a conventional female role, her aggressiveness goes well beyond what was desired of women"). Make sure, though, that when you use this you are genuinely challenging someone. "Some people may think Hamlet is not a tragedy, but I will prove that it is" is a false challenge; the "some people may think" formulation is too vague to present any opposition worth arguing against, and in bad papers the "some people" may be entirely imaginary.

Writing introductions is particularly hard, because they must motivate and structure the whole paper. An introduction, moreover, is often written when the rest of paper hasn't been written yet, and the paper will change while it is written. Some writing instructors suggest, therefore, that introductions be written last, once the paper has assumed its final shape. I can't do this -- the blank space at the beginning nags at me unbearably. I therefore write "sacrificial introductions" -- short introductions that get me started on what I think I am going to say. Then, when I have finished, I go back and replace the sacrificial introduction with a polished one. (Remember, the art of writing is the art of revising).

Because introductions are hard, many student papers have very bad ones: frequently I can cross out the first few sentences of an introduction and improve the paper by doing so. Some are far too general: "Throughout history, poets have written about love" is an awful introduction -- it's trite, boring, and it gives very little clue about what you're actually writing on. "Throughout history, men have gone out to work while women stayed home to cook and clean" is worse: not only is the generalization too general to be interesting, but it is dead wrong ( in many agricultural societies, women work the fields and gardens, and many men had their shops and workshops on the ground floors of their houses). Do not open with tired and dangerous generalizations like this: they will utterly fail in attracting readers. "Maid Marian's decision to run away from home in search of Robin Hood uses one ideal of female behavior -- faithfulness in love -- as an excuse for ignoring many others, such as obeying her parents," is far more interesting because it is far more specific, and readers will be able to figure out for themselves that you are talking about love and women's social roles in history. Also, you don't need to give biographical information. "Geoffrey Chaucer was a major poet, who died in 1400 after writing The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, two works critics have hailed as masterpieces," belongs in an encyclopedia or a book report, not in an academic paper. Assume your readers know the basic information about an author and a text, unless the work is obscure or you have new information to report.