Part 1 – Main components for an effective introduction

There are 5 key features that should be added to your introduction.

They are:

1)     A „Hook“, an eye-catcher, an interesting idea that inspires the reader to continue reading.

2)     Contextualising material – some background information about the topic to make sure that your readers understand what exactly your are going to write about. Well-written context typically helps authors to kill two birds with one stone: on the one hand, the reader gets acquianted to the topic and the direction of your thoughts, on the other hand, she/he can use her/his critical thinking skills to predict the content of the paper, which will make the reading process more interesting and fruitful.

3)     Structure of the paper – it is always nice for the reader to find out what she/he will be reading about so that she/he can navigate through the paper easily.

4)     Rationale – a reason for writing this scientific paper.

5)     A thesis statement  - the main focus of the paper, a particular idea/claim you will be developing/discussing/arguing about.

Exercise 2: Write your own intruduction using some of the following inspirational techniques for all 5 parts of an effective introduction:

1.      Hooks

a)      Interesting Question Hook. This is an example of an interesting question hook on the topic of succeeding in career:

What is the difference between successful employees who follow rules and entrepreneurs who break them?

b)     Strong Statement/Declaration Hook. This is an example of a strong statement for the topic of online college classes:

Online college classes are cheaper and more effective than in-person college classes.  

c)      Fact/Statistic Hook. Here is an example of a factual hook about an essay on gun ownership in the United States.

Almost two-thirds of American adults at some point in their life lived in a home with at least one gun.

d)     Metaphor/ Simile Hook A business blog is like a magnet that pulls clients to a company.

More information on how to write a good hook can be retrieved from  https://www.academicwritingsuccess.com/7-sensational-essay-hooks/

2.      Contextualizing material. There are 2 basic rules to follow:

1)     Create context for the referenced material so that the reader expects some ground, some evidence from you. Cited sources (quotations, paraphrases and summaries) are meant to be supporting your own ideas.

2)     Signal using specific language where exactly borrowed ideas begin:

Example 1: According to (author/source)

Example 2: Author + verb

Example verbs: says, writes, accepts, criticizes, describes, disagrees, discusses, explains, identifies, insists, offers, points out, suggests, warns, argues.

More information on how to write context material could be found at the RMIT University (Australia) at

https://emedia.rmit.edu.au/learninglab/content/contextualising

and the Vantedbilt University Writing website:

https://www.vanderbilt.edu/writing/wp-content/uploads/sites/164/2016/10/Introducing-and-Contextualing-evidence.pdf

3.      Structure of a paper. Read the following example:

In this paper, we introduce a gretl package for performing BMA on the GLM: following the original idea by Green (1995, 2003) and in particular the subsequent work by Lamnisos et al. (2009) in probit models, we use a reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) scheme……

…. The rest of the paper is organised as follows: Section 2 lays down the statistical background for GLMs and RJMCMC; Section 3 describes the Bayesian algebraic representation of models; Section 4 deals with parallelisation and convergence; in Section 5 we discuss in detail the package and its main features; Section 6 provides three empirical applications of the package on different GLMs; finally, Section 7 concludes.

Source: Lucchetti, Riccardo (Jack) and Pedini, Luca, (2020), ParMA: Parallelised Bayesian Model Averaging for Generalised Linear Models, No 2020:28, Working Papers, Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari", https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ven:wpaper:2020:28.

4.      Rationale example:

Unfertilized eggs contain large stores of ribosomes, mRNA, and other components of the protein synthetic machinery, yet they produce proteins at a barely detectable rate. Upon fertilization or artificial activation, eggs exhibits a dramatic increase in the synthesis of developmentally significant proteins. These observations lead to questions as to why unfertilized eggs are inactive in protein synthesis and as to the mechanism of their subsequent activation. We propose to compare the translational efficiency of ribosomes from unfertilized and fertilized eggs.

5.      Watch a video on how to write thesis statements

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKXkemYldmw

Now write your own introduction.