In all the ambits, the introduction should lead your reader from generalization to your particular field of research. It sets the context for the research you have conducted by summarizing the current understanding about the topic, stating the purpose of your paper, possibly as a hypothesis, question, or research problem, outlining your rationale and describing the remaining structure.
In the humanities, the introduction is where your reader meets you as a writer and first learns how you will talk to them during the rest of the paper, in the discussion and conclusion sections: how you explain problems, value details or use humour; how often you refer to the texts at your disposal, where you stand in comparison to other researchers, what interests you and what does not. The important thing is not to make this less visible, but to make it clear that you know you are showing these things. This is what will establish your authority, in your reader’s eyes, to interpret the meaning in other peoples’ production in the humanities: to ask and answer in your own writing interpretive questions about how others express meaning.
Because the reader will have learnt the important details about the substance of your paper in both the title and the abstract, the beginning of the introduction is a good place to introduce some kind of example from the middle of your topic rather than to repeat your objectives or reassert your main claim. In this respect, it is rather like the inverted compound title (see the fifth example in
Title styles) which ‘drops’ the reader into the middle of the subject before pulling back and contextualizing. The following are the opening lines of introductions to a paper on the importance of fairy tales in children’s education and a paper on the popular reception of the twentieth-century art movement known as abstract expressionism, respectively.
 | If it was late at night and you were going to tell your little sister a bedtime story, would you choose the one about the boy and girl who discovered a beautiful sugar house in the middle of the forest, were trapped there by an old woman who wanted to eat them, but who eventually managed to escape after roasting her alive in her own oven? |
| In a well-known cartoon by the French artist Jean-Jacques Sempé, a group of museum-goers are shown standing in respectful silence on the threshold of the twentieth-century rooms of an art museum while their guide tells them they are extremely lucky to have her there because otherwise they would understand nothing of what they are about to see. |
The next line of each introduction brings the reader firmly back to the topic under discussion.
| You might well decide not to; but as the English historian Marina Warner has said, to understand the meaning of many fairy tales, one has to look at the context in which they were told, at who was telling them, to whom and why. |
| The reader may smile but as abstract painter Nicolas Carone once observed to his friend and contemporary Jackson Pollock, “Who the hell do you know who understands your picture? People understand the painting – talk about the technique, the dripping, the splattering, the automatism and all that, but who really knows the content?” |
This is one way of starting the introduction section.
In the following paragraphs, your main objective is to introduce your reader to the concepts you will be discussing (issue, question, research question or final project statement), show your method of approach to the topic, provide the necessary background information or context and, before finishing, reassert the claim the paper will make.
The last paragraph of the introduction might return to the detail of the first when it does this, so reminding the reader of the raw material they and you constantly need to re-examine.
| Finally, I propose that before we accept what we are sold about children’s entertainment, we should remember two things. First, history shows that fairy stories were never escapist tales about magical phenomena that only children could believe in; they are serious stories that deal with life and death in ways that help people become adults. Second, the child who reads, watches or listens to fairy tales deserves the same complexity adults are given when they read, watch or listen to products of fiction, if only because children are people who should be happily and purposefully on their way to becoming adults. The problem, of course, is that some of the adults in charge can’t see that: Walt Disney Pictures may live happily ever after, but more than one child who saw the 2017 adaptation of Beauty and the Beast was actually disappointed by the strange but somehow majestic beast’s final transformation into a very unextraordinary prince. |
