What you will achieve
Develop a messy first draft for your Introduction.
Prerequisite:
- Read 2–3 papers in your target journal to see how Introductions are written in your field: Analysing papers in your field.
Writing the messy first Introduction draft
1. Brain dump your ideas
Use the Freewriting technique to answer these prompts. Set a 10-minute timer for each.
- Why does this study exist?
- What was missing before this study?
- What did this study aim to learn or establish?
- What did this study not attempt to cover?
Note missing information
If you realise you are missing information, make note of this but do not stop writing.
2. Organise your ideas
Refer to the standard Introduction structure in What is an Introduction. Place each idea in one of these buckets:
- Broader context
- Current state of knowledge/gap
- Study aims and scope
If you’re not sure, choose the most likely bucket. You can change it later.
3. Identifying key claims
Within each bucket, highlight the most important ideas. These are your key claims.
Example: Identifying key claims
Broader context brain dump bucket:
- mangroves provide important ecosystem services
- and we want to study them for their natural coastal protection properties
- we should protect them
- but also understand them
Deciding what’s important: Is this study ultimately about protecting or understanding mangrove forests? That depends on the audience I’m writing for: are they interested in how to protect mangroves, or how to use mangroves for coastal protection?
E.g. If I’m writing for Coastal engineering, the most important claim would be: we should study mangroves for their natural coastal protection properties.
4. Supporting claims
Back up the key claims with supporting information. Use the table below as a starting points and delete rows that don’t apply to your study:
| Subsection | Key claim (step 3) | Supporting information (e.g. literature) (step 4) |
|---|---|---|
| Broader context | This research is important for society, because … | - - - |
| This research is important for science, because … | - - - | |
| Current state of knowledge & knowledge gaps | We currently know that …, but we don’t know … | - - - |
| Studying … is important, because … | - - - | |
| Study aims & scope | NA | - - |
Look up additional literature
If you find that you can’t fully support a claim, look up additional literature.
5. Turn your claims into paragraphs
For each row in the table, write a sentence that states the key claim, then write additional sentences with supporting information to support the claim. Do this for each bucket (subsection), so that you end up with:
- ~1-2 Broader context paragraphs
- Several Current state of knowledge & gaps paragraphs (~1 paragraph per research question/knowledge gap)
- ~1 Study aims and scope paragraph
Next steps:
- Get input from your writing team: Asking for feedback