introducing the introduction

 

Introducing the Introduction

 

I assume I don’t need an introduction.

― Anne Rice

 

Write an introduction with context and purpose.

 

Write an introduction that places your work into the broader context, establishes why your work is important, identifies the research gap, states the purpose, and provides the hypotheses or research questions.

The Introduction is where “The Poetry” is. I call this The Poetry because the Introduction is where you creatively (some of us more creatively than others…) place your work into the greater context of the world, first painting with broad strokes and then carefully funneling down to the details.

In the Introduction, you want your reader to understand the importance of your topic (the Why), the need for the research (the What), what you researched (more What), and, briefly, how you investigated it (the How). Accordingly, I follow a simple recipe when writing the introduction. The ingredients are your topic, your literature review, your research gap, your purpose, your hypotheses or research questions, and your general methods.

The steps for this writing recipe are:

Step 1:   Put the research topic into the broader, global context.

You might be narrowly focused on a specific study area or a wee slice of a broader topic, but you need to paint the big picture of why what you are doing is important. For example, a recent report a student and I worked on involved revisiting the larger springs of Texas to see if they were still flowing. To put this work into the broader, global context, we discussed why springs are important (an important source of water to rivers and streams and an important source of water for people and the environment). This step establishes the general importance of your research topic.

Step 2:   Describe the broad issues and challenges associated with the research topic.

The purpose of this step is to identify the broad issues and challenges associated with your topic. For our spring study, we discussed how groundwater production and climate change were affecting flows at springs, drying them up and impacting water supplies and the environment, again at the global scale. Steps 1 and 2 help the reader place your research into this larger, broader context. The issues and challenges you identify may relate to your specific topic, so you are foreshadowing your work here.  

Step 3:   Describe the study-specific issues and challenges associated with the research topic.

Step 2 describes the broader issue and challenges, but now it’s time to bring the discussion down to your study area. You may be able to jump from global to local, but you might want to bridge with a national discussion and a state discussion before discussing your local study area. For our spring study, we bridged from global to national and then to our study area, which was the state of Texas. If our study area was local or regional, we would have also included a state discussion.

Step 4:   Discuss previous work and identify the research gap

Now is the time to briefly discuss what has previously been done on your research topic in your study area. Generally, this is done by discussing older work first followed by more recent work. If there is not much previous work, then you may be able to discuss it all in this part of the introduction (thus avoiding having a background section, at least for the literature review). However, if this discussion reaches a point where it needs its own Background section, then just provide an overview of key points as you drive toward identifying the research gap.

When the previous work discussion reaches the point that it needs its own section is a matter of style. Again, think of your reader. If you think that the discussion of previous work is becoming overbearing to the reader, that’s a good sign to give it its own section and just include a brief summary in the Introduction. You can get a sense of overbearing by the relative number of words of this section/chapter compared to the words in the other sections/chapters. One clear sign is that if the discussion of previous work becomes as long as other sections/chapters in the paper, then it probably should have its own section/chapter and only be summarized in the Introduction.

For our paper on the springs of Texas, our discussion of previous work was short because there hadn’t been much work done on statewide surveying of springs. Therefore, we discussed the key references and noted that the springs previously surveyed had not been resurveyed for almost 50 years.

Step 5:   Clearly present the purpose of the research and the hypotheses and research questions

With the research gap identified, you can now clearly state the purpose of the work. I like to be extremely direct: “The purpose of this study was to (blahblahblah).” and will start the paragraph for this step with that statement. After that, you should clearly state what the hypotheses and/or research questions are:

The purpose of this study was to revisit the 281 springs in Brune’s 1975 report to assess their current flow status with the hypothesis that more springs have gone dry since the publication of his report.

Step 6:   Broadly describe the methods used to achieve the goals of the research

You’ll have an entire section to describe the details of your methodology, but you should end your introduction with a bridge to the Methods section of the paper by simply and broadly stating what you did to address the purpose and hypotheses and/or research questions for the study.

To test this hypothesis, we used a variety of maps and remote sensing techniques and limited field trips to “revisit” the springs in Brune’s report.

We simply appended this sentence to the paragraph under Step 5.

The recipe above helps to provide the elusive “flow” of good writing. By “flow” I mean how good writing seamlessly moves from one sentence, paragraph, or section to the next one and works together as a coherent whole. The writing recipe above systematically funnels from the global (importance to the world) to the local (the study at hand). The “bridges” I refer to logically connect one set of information to the next set such that the information flows in a logical manner.

I often get asked by students and mentees, “How long does this need to be?” and my unsatisfying Zen-masterish answer is, “As long as it needs to be.” It needs to be as long as it needs to be to convey your message, and you don’t really know what that length is until you write it.

One factor in defining length is the format for your writing. The Introduction for a book will be longer (and different) than an Introduction for a report which will be longer than that for a journal article. For each of those formats, you should consider the total length of your format and then consider how much space you want to dedicate to the introduction. For example, if you are writing a 50,000-word book and your outline has 10 chapters, then about 5,000 words (50,000 divided by 10) seems like a good target.

You should be able to (and should) write your introduction before you conduct the actual work to test your hypothesis. That doesn’t mean that you can’t go back and edit as your research progresses (you should) but writing as soon as you can organize your thoughts helps identify gaps in your logic and literature review that can impact your research. Your introduction supports and sets your mission statement for your research, and you need that mission statement and supporting background before you start your research. As Robert Burns effectively wrote, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” If your research goes awry and changes as a result, you can adjust the introduction as needed.

 

copyright Robert E. Mace 2025