I hate writing introductions more than anything imaginable.
Shouldn’t there be some sort of recipe for this sort of thing? A standard practice? An equation? A set of rules to follow?
Why is this so *hard*??
I hate writing introductions more than anything imaginable.
Shouldn’t there be some sort of recipe for this sort of thing? A standard practice? An equation? A set of rules to follow?
Why is this so *hard*??
Treat it like a talk/lecture/presentation.
For me, treating papers as presentations forces decisions on what precise message I’m trying to deliver and how much of an “education” (message) to deliver to the reader since things will quickly become impractical or useless if you include or leave out too much.
Where as in paper/book mode you can always add another page, make another reference, or write another book! This then causes problems with the size and complexity of your message and butting heads with assigned page limits –which are dumb–
In my experience treating the paper like a lecture forces me to nail down exactly what I’m going to talk about and how much I’m going to talk about it, and it seems to coincide well with the ~20 page limits.
Or….
Take a break a come back to it later!
have you written the rest of the paper already? If you have, take a leetle break already! And maybe things will come into place when you get back to work. Or, if you haven’t written the meat of the paper yet, do that first, because it’s *IMPOSSIBLE* to write a good introduction before writing the paper. Somebody (E.M. Forster, I think?) once said “how can I know what I think until I see what I say?” And, well…that’s just the way papers work.
Seriously. Introductions SUCK. Conclusions ain’t much fun either, but they’re ever-so-much-easier, and I always write those before the intros. Good luck!