How to Write Introduction

1. Defintion: Introduction is the act of introducing something. Introduction indicates the topic that the Report is about. It describes how the body of the Report is organized and explains the point of writing the Report.

2. What should and Introduction do?: Whatever you are writing, Thesis, research paper, technical reports, the introduction will be the first thing the reader sees, if the reader found abstract interesting. So, introduction comes right after the abstract section. It alerts the reader’s interest, provides a context for the main issue you are working and indicate your conclusion and point of view. It also indicate the scope and direction of the paper, and act as a navigation guide to its reading. If an introduction is poorly written or constructed… then you have lost your readers’ goodwill right from the beginning.

Always remember nothing comes as surprise to the reader in scientific writing. Scientific writing is not like a fiction writing in which you tell a story and keep the suspense till end. In Scientific writing, the whole ‘story’ is outlined in the introduction, and given in detail in the body.Everything must follow logically from a starting point. So an introduction must contains at least following parts:

3.      Parts of introduction

—  Brief, relevant background information

—  Specific area

—  Problem Identification and Impact

—  A thesis statement

—  Your point of view

—  Next sections

3.1       Brief, relevant background information: Provide your reader a brief background regarding your topic. You can skip this step by indicating the problem identification, but it’s not consider a good approach as some of the reader does not have necessary background knowledge regarding the topic you are discussing.

Provide your reader as much relevant information as you can, don’t indicate irrelevant information as it can distract reader interest. Provide all the key points of topic you are working on so that reader can understand its Impact.

3.2       Specific area: After providing the brief background information, narrow down to specific area you are concentrating. For example if you are working on wireless networking, give brief background information about wireless networking than narrow down to specific wireless networking topic such as Ad-hoc wireless networks or cognitive radio networks.

3.3       Problem Identification and Impact: After providing the enough background information next step is to identify the main problems in the existing system. Give the reader a practical and valid problem and provide its impact on the existing system. The introduction should provide enough information such as, what could be the severity of the identified problem to the system, what damage it can done etc.

3.4       Thesis Statement: The thesis statement is one sentence (or more if the assignment is long and complex) which explicitly states the focus and direction of the writing.In a report, the thesis statement is often separated from the rest of the introduction under the heading Aim (or Purpose) of the Report The thesis statement often begins with expressions like:

—  ‘This report examines… ’

—  ‘This report will discuss…’

—  ‘This report demonstrates…’

We recommend that you adopt this strategy, especially if you are an inexperienced writer. That way, you won’t forget to put the thesis statement into your introduction, and your reader has a clear idea of what the focus will be. Provide the solution that you have proposed to solve the identified problem. In introduction proposed solution comes as an Algorithm, where its implication or coding is done in the report section.

3.5       Your point of view: You may find it very difficult to know what is meant by a ‘point of view’. As a researcher, you are new to the discipline, and you probably don’t know enough about the subject matter to have a point of view about it. Your point of view mean:

Should avoid personal comments such as

—  I think that such-and-such’

—  In my opinion, such-and-such’.

So what can ‘your point of view’ mean?Generally speaking, having a ‘point of view’ means coming to a particular conclusion rather than leaving the question up in the air. What you have observed or conclude after the experiments.

3.6       Next sections: You can skip this section, but, including this can make up your introduction. As described above a introduction provides a navigation guide to its reader, indicating what sections and points you are going to describe in the remaining report will help reader to decide what coming next and whether it is necessary to continue reading or not if the topic is related to him.

4.      How long should the introduction be?: One common mistake writer often do, they provide a too detail a lengthy introduction. As a rule an introduction should not be longer than about 10% – 15% of the length of the report.