Writing Your Introduction

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” This old adage suggests the importance of writing good introductions; however, writing introductions is one of the hardest parts of writing a paper. (Conclusions are another hard part to write, but we’ll discuss how to tackle them in the lesson “Writing a First Draft Appropriate to Purpose and Audience.”) As you go through the process of researching and writing your thesis, you usually form ideas about what you will say in the body paragraphs of your paper. Your body paragraphs can’t stand alone. Your audience has to gain a general sense of your subject before you take them deeper into the body of your paper where you expand on ideas and provide detailed evidence.

A group of strange creatures saying hello.

Source: "Say Hello on Mudis," Luis Eduardo Zamorano
Saavedra, Flickr

Three reasons introductions are important

  1. First impressions are crucial. Your introduction not only introduces your topic to your reader, but it also gives a first impression of your writing style and the quality of your paper. If your introduction is boring or doesn’t make sense, your reader is going to begin reading your paper with a negative first impression.
  2. Your reader learns the topic of your paper. Your introduction contains your thesis, which is the central argument on which your paper is based.
  3. Your introduction captures the reader’s attention. A good introduction makes the reader want to continue reading. A great introduction can even make your reader be a little forgiving of minor flaws in the rest of your paper.

Types of introductions to consider

Let’s discuss a few approaches you can use when writing your introduction.You could do the following:

  1. Describe a person, place, or event that will be explored in your paper. For example, the October 2010 issue of Texas Monthly published “Innocence Lost,” an article by Pamela Colloff about Anthony Graves, a man convicted and sentenced to death for a heinous crime, although there was no clear motive, no physical evidence, and another suspect who claimed to have committed the crime. Colloff begins with an arresting description of the night of the crime. Let’s read it.

    A few hours before dawn on a sticky summer night in Somerville, a one-stoplight town ninety miles northwest of Houston, police chief Jewel Fisher noticed the faint smell of burning wood. Fisher was following up on a late-night prowler call east of the main drag, in the predominantly black neighborhood that runs alongside the railroad tracks. Turning down the town’s darkened streets, he suddenly caught sight of a house on fire and realized that he was looking at the home of 45-year-old Bobbie Davis, a supervisor at the Brenham State School. Flames climbed the walls and skittered along the roof of the one-story brick structure, casting a murky orange glow. The windows had already been smashed in by several neighbors, who had screamed the names of the children they feared were trapped inside, pleading for them to wake up. Fisher quickly radioed for help, but when volunteer firefighters arrived, they discovered the bodies of Bobbie, her teenage daughter, and her four grandchildren inside. Each person had been brutally attacked and left to die in the blaze.

    This introduction makes you want to continue reading, doesn’t it? You probably want to know who did it, why, and if they ever caught the killer. Colloff uses sensory language to engage the reader in her story. You might be interested to know that all charges were dropped against Anthony Graves less than a month after publication of the article. Now that’s a powerful introduction.

  2. Use a compelling statistic or other facts that you learned during your research. Let’s look at another example. This is the introduction to the article “Is the US Government Underestimating the Cost of Climate Change?” published on the Scientific American magazine website.

    All those insults and changes resulting from climate disruption add up quickly: $15 billion for Midwest farmers staring at a year of crop loss and rebuilding as the Mississippi River floods; 600 deaths and 1,000 hospitalizations as a heat wave bakes Chicago; and $147 million gone as Alaska’s king crab fishery succumbs to acidification and changing prey/predator structures.

    The writer, Douglas Fischer, uses statistics about the cost of climate change to make a relatively dry subject, U.S. government policy, accessible to the average reader.

  3. Begin with a quotation or an adage. You can use a familiar quotation or an adage, such as the one I used in the introduction to this section: “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” Most of us have heard this adage at one time or another, and it is a great way to sum up this section. You can also use a quotation from one of your sources or an appropriate, perhaps lesser-known quotation. The Web site Bartleby.com allows you to search the book Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, or you can look for a copy of the book in the reference section of the library.
  4. Begin with an historical review. For example, if you are writing about people who deny that climate change is a problem, you could begin your paper by tracing the evolution of the debate from an earlier time, perhaps 1970, when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was formed.

Introductions to avoid

While there are certain approaches to your introduction that you might want to consider, there are most certainly a few approaches you want to avoid, as explained in the points that follow: