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An objective missing from this list that you might expect to find is the directive to engage the reader. Clearly, all introductions need to engage the reader, but this advice is too often misinterpreted as an invitation to be entertaining or cute. In academic writing, you don’t need a gimmick to engage your readers; you can assume they care about the subject. You will engage them if you can articulate why your topic matters, doing so in terms of existing thinking in the field.

Especially in a first draft, the objectives just listed are not so easily achieved, which is why many writers wisely defer writing the polished version of the introduction until they have completed at least one draft of the paper. At that point, you will usually have a clearer notion of why your subject matters and which aspect of your thesis to place first. Often, the conclusion of a first draft becomes the introduction to the second draft.

In any case, the standard shape of an introduction is a funnel. It starts wide, providing background and generalization and then narrows the subject to a particular issue or topic. Here is a typical example from an essay entitled “On Political Labels” by Christopher Borick.

One of the first things you should think about when you see or hear a political label is where it came from. Common political labels such as “liberal” or “conservative” have long histories that shed light on their contemporary use. It’s important to recognize that a label’s meaning differs from place to place and over time. A conservative in Texas may believe much differently from a conservative in New York, just as an American conservative varies in view points from a conservative in Norway. Similarly, someone calling herself a conservative in 2005 would significantly differ from someone calling himself a conservative in 1905 or even 1975. You may wonder, with such variation over time and place, how can we attach meaning to key political terms at all? While not always easy to see, at least part of the answer can be discovered through an examination of the history of the terms.

The paragraph begins with a generalization in the first sentence (about standard responses to the subject at hand) and funnels down in the last sentence to a qualified working thesis (that some of the meaning lies in the linguistic history of the terms themselves). This does not mean that the first sentence of the paragraph is a throwaway, something broad and bland. Make the first sentence count. Say something incisive and substantive.

PUTTING AN ISSUE OR QUESTION IN CONTEXT

Rather than leaping immediately to the paper’s issue, question, or problem, most effective introductions provide some broader context to indicate why the issue matters. Although the various models we offer here differ in small ways from discipline to discipline, the essential characteristics they share suggest that most professors across the curriculum want the same things in an introduction: the locating of a problem or question within a context that provides background and rationale, culminating in a working thesis.

It is important for writers to be conscious of their choice of interpretive context. As we argued in Chapter 6, things don’t just “mean” in the abstract; they mean in particular contexts. Thus, to a significant extent, context shapes and determines what we see. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are always locating things in some context. An interpretive context is a lens through which we scrutinize what we are trying to understand. The best writers defend their choice of interpretive context and make their readers aware of it from the start.

Providing an Introductory Context: A Political Science Professor Speaks

In the following Voice from Across the Curriculum, political science professor Jack Gambino notes the usefulness of anomalies for contextualizing papers in his discipline. The discovery of an anomaly, something that does not fit with conventional ways of thinking, can serve as a useful point of departure