What goes into an introductory paragraph?
When you are prepared to write your introduction for papers of 1,000 words or longer, there are plenty of ways to proceed. I would like to mention three of them: • First, you might open with a story of some sort that subtly outlines your theme. It is usually a good idea to make the theme explicit in the following paragraph. • Second, more often than beginning with a story, students who write good papers present their thesis early in the first paragraph (not necessarily in the first or even second sentence, but they place it up there somewhere) and then, in the following sentences, they note what follows step-by-step: “Below, I first xxxx. Next, I discuss xxxx. Also important is xxxx. And I conclude by arguing that xxxx.” There are many ways of wording those sentences–my choices were not very creative–but at root they act as road signs, telling the reader where you are taking them in the paper. In addition, this approach is a great check on whether you maintain your thesis throughout;
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