Creating Compelling Introductions when Publishing Academic Research | Ep. 4

Do you struggle riding that first sentence of your project? Does it seem like your introductions are messy or unfocused no matter what you do? Hey co-authors, in this episode we unpacked the art of crafting an introduction that informs your reader of what your research is about, as well as convincing them of its impact and value. You'll learn to avoid the most common pitfalls and discover a clear, disciplined, flexible structure to draw readers in from the very first line. So let's dive in. Hey there folks, good to see you again. So to start off today I have a little bit of a confession as an editor for a journal. I think that if you've ever edited a journal or you know another editor, you know this to be true or you can corroborate this. But what I would say is I get anywhere from 250 to 350 submissions a year. And of those submissions, probably about 30 or 40 of them may get published. So it's a very low acceptance rate. As you can imagine, as an editor I'm fielding all of those submissions. And so I have to be sure that I'm getting people feedback back on their submissions in a timely manner. So that way if it's something that needs to go out to reviewers, they have plenty of time then to review it. They're not under the gun because I'm taking too much time. Or if it's something that's not a good fit for the journal, the authors can find that out quickly and then they can submit it somewhere else. So since I'm looking through hundreds of submissions, as you might imagine, I have things that I'm looking for that make my work quicker and more efficient. And the key place for that is the introduction of a submission. Whenever I'm reading an introduction, I'm looking for very specific things. And what I have found is that most people are disastrously bad at writing their introductions. And as a result, I think that some work that might actually be connected to the journal or might be compelling to the readership, never makes it its way to reviewers because then it becomes obvious to me that you don't know enough about this journal. It's history. It's audience, all those things for you'd be able to write a compelling piece of scholarship for it. So you might have a really great idea. You might have a really great design, but it's not connecting with the people who actually read the journal. And I think that's something that we don't oftentimes think about that we are actually submitting this work to be read by actual people who rely on this outlet for specific insights. If we take that same sort of ethic, whether you're writing a class paper or a thesis dissertation, journal article, grant, whatever it might be, really thinking about the audience as being real living people and not just this amorphous blob helps us focus in then what it is that we're actually trying to communicate and to get them hooked on the thing that we think of as important and that they need to know. But that means that you have one and a half to two and a half pages to convince me that what you're doing is worth my time to read the rest of your article, to read the rest of your submission, to read the cover letter, to read all the other materials that are a part of your submission. Because if I look at that and those things are not connecting well with me, then I'm not sending it out for review. So that's what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about how to write a good compelling introduction in your academic research. Because I think that if we can do that, then we can get people engaged with our work and get ideas disseminated out to people and then that then has a real impact on our classrooms, on our communities and the people around us. So let's dive in. Are you interested in mastering scholarly writing, developing productivity and increasing impact, all while staying healthy? Then welcome to the Publishing Academic Research Podcast. Hi, my name is Dr. Kyle Retic. And I'm a full professor at the University of Northern Iowa. I've written dozens of articles, books, chapters and essays as well as edited some of the top journals in my discipline. I meet so many scholars who have creative, innovative and daring ideas, but can never seem to get those projects from proposals to print. I want you to get your work in the hands of people who will read it and appreciate it. So let's get into this week's big idea. If you find yourself having problems writing introductions, first thing I would say is that you are not alone. A lot of people have a lot of anxiety around that first sentence of whatever it is that they're writing. It kind of sits there and stares at them and mute, reprimand of all of the choices that they have made that have led up to this moment of staring at this blank page. And yet we have to get over that, right? We have to get over this idea that writing nothing is somehow better than writing something. And so what I want to do is address some problems that I see with people's introductions. That way we can hone in on those, make sure that we avoid them or at least edit them out. So that way we can move forward with our writing and get it into the hands of the people who want to read it. I would say that the first and probably the most egregious problem that I see, that a lot of introductions don't inform or convince the reader as to why that research is important. Oftentimes I think that people write with this expectation that I don't need to convince my reader that this is important because it's going to be published. So by virtue of it being published, it's important enough for you to read. A, there's no guarantee that it's going to be published because you're not writing a good introduction. So that's A, but B, you really kind of have to think about this in terms of the attention economy in which we live. Your average reader, whether that's an instructor for your class, thesis dissertation, committee chair or a reviewer for a journal, only has so much time to read something. And in competition, that time that they might devote, there's television, there's media, there's other projects that they have to do. There's their own research that they need to get down the classes that they're teaching. There's family and kids and vacations and just all sorts of things that are vying for their attention. So you have to convince a reader that what you're talking about is more important, at least for a small amount of time than any of those other things. You also have to convince the editor that what you're writing about is important enough that they will make the choice to include your work in their journal or their outlet, chapter, grant, whatever it might be, and exclude other work. Because you might have a good idea, you might have an important topic, but you need to make sure that you're convincing your reader that it is the most important topic. It's the most important thing that we could be talking about. Oftentimes I feel like a lot of people don't do a really good job of setting this up and really convincing a reader that this is worth our time and worth the journal space or the outlet space or whatever it might be to accept. Another common problem that I see is a lot of cliche or filler phrases. I mean, if you are listening to this, you probably have your own sort of like disciplinary taboo thing. But for me, whenever I see something that says, "People have been communicating since time immemorial," or "People have always been communicating," or "People have always had communication problems." I mean, yeah, duh. Of course they have, right? That's why we have an entire discipline devoted to the study of communication. I don't need you to convince me that my discipline is important. I'm already here for that. I think people are trying to convince me as the reader that what they're talking about is important. Oh, let me make this appeal to the history of all of humankind as the justification for my study. You don't need to do that. All of human history doesn't need to be your justification. You need to have specific justifications, which we'll talk about here in a little bit, specific justifications for why your study is important, but some sort of like grand, empty statement like that. It's just bad writing. So I would say that the third problem that I see in bad introductions is whenever an introduction does not really introduce the specific concept, ideal, or relationship. That's under examination. I get to the end of the first four or five, six paragraphs of a paper, and I'm still not sure what the actual framework is, why they think that these concepts are connected. There doesn't seem to be a through line to the literature that leads me from the problem they've discussed to the actual litatures that they're drawing on. None of those things are present. As a result, I'm left wondering what is the academic entrance into this conversation? What's the part that brings this to the level of it being research to actual knowledge generation in ways that can be vetted through whatever types of logics your particular methods or disciplines have for you? And so, taking together a really bad introduction, it's not really convinced me as a reader as to why I need to read this. If it does try to do that, it's doing that through cliched writing that makes appeals to issues or problems or ideas that are far too large for whatever it is that they're trying to talk about. Or it's not really introducing me to a specific set of frameworks, a sort of heuristic vocabulary of the specific variables, concepts, ideas, whatever it might be that are animating the study. Now that we've talked a little bit about these problems, what then is a good structure for an introduction that's really going to catch a reader's attention? The first thing I would say is that every discipline is going to have different norms of writing. Everything that was or well in his six rules of writing that said, break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. So what I'm going to say is I'm going to give you some rules to help you craft your introductions, but if those rules are in conflict with what your disciplinary norms are, then again, break through rules before doing anything outright barbarous. I would say that a strong approach to an introduction typically has four or five paragraphs. And I say four or five paragraphs, mainly because in a 30-page article, your introduction should never be any more than two pages. And so that's about four or five paragraphs, depending on how you write your paragraphs, how you set them up. In the introduction, each pair of them are in the introduction. graph serves a particular function and those functions Funless from broader to more particular, but actually I don't even like that metaphor that much to be honest with you That's something that you know, I think people in like your English class, you know your composition 101 class back in your Freshman days might have said to you, oh, you know your final format go from general to specific I think that's one of the reasons why you get these cliche phrases like Communication has been a problem since time immemorial. You're starting general. Okay. Well, that's way too general It's not helpful Instead, I don't want you to think about is going from general to particular I want you to think about it instead as your research project is like a diamond. It's valuable Important and like a diamond it has facets to it You don't get to write about the entire diamond if you think about any problem that you might address Environmental degradation racism sexism quantum mechanics any of those things You're not going to write about the entire branch of that thing in 30 pages or less Instead, you're going to have a very specific problem within that larger thing that you're trying to get at In other words, you're going to have a specific facet of the diamond that you are going to address So your first paragraph is you showing me what the diamond is What's the problem exigeness issue that you're trying to address through your research? So for example, if I wanted to look at students and their mental health concerns or their mental health needs Okay, well, that's a huge issue right like there's all sorts of Communication problems. There's institutional student affairs problems. There's financial aspects to it There's psychological aspects to it Sociological aspects right like there's so many disciplines fields modes of thought about this very particular thing What I need to do as a writer is convince my reader that this conversation about student mental health needs is important So how could I do that? Well, I might have a paragraph that's probably full of statistics and anecdotes or stories things that really kind of help a reader Recognize the gravity of the situation. I might say here's how many students Have mental health needs here's how many of those things go unfulfilled here's how because those needs go unfulfilled We have these other poor outcomes. I'm convincing my reader that there is a problem and that the problem is of sufficient Significance that it justifies my study and the journal space for publication That's what I'm trying to do in my first paragraph. I'm just trying to convince my reader that there is a problem And that the problem is large enough to merit our attention and again to go back to the metaphor here I'm trying to show them the importance the worth of my diamond the second paragraph and the third paragraph are The introduction of the specific dynamic that you are looking at or in other words the specific facet of the diamond that you are examining Which should be the actual academic entrance into the problem. So student and mental health needs is this big diamond What I might be interested in again as a communication studies person is how are students self-disclosing Mental health needs to their instructors. Okay. Now all of a sudden we have a very specific entrance Into this broader conversation. I'm looking at the specific academic language that you will be using through the rest of the article So whenever I said student self-disclosure there is entire bodies of literature about self-disclosure in my field So I would be looking at those Siding those appropriately in those two paragraphs You should be justifying why the framework that you're using is the best one for your approach to that study If I'm going to be looking at self-disclosure of students is there past literature that shows that student self-disclosure Is a strong predictor of students seeking counseling seeking help getting help not getting help because if that's the case If I can make the argument that self-disclosure is important not just from a scholarly standpoint We can practically help students who are struggling with mental health needs Then all of a sudden my framework and my study become far more important to my reader So paragraphs two and three are really about showing me as the reader that you are Studying a specific dynamic one that can actually be addressed in the 25 to 30 pages that you get and that dynamic that you're looking at is grounded in the specificity of the literature That is a part of the scholarly conversation not just on this thing But also as a part of the outlet that you're choosing you know a lot of times I get submissions And they're about a dynamic that might be important or insightful where people in my part of the discipline But it's using bodies of literature and it's using modes of thought that are not a part of what my journal is And so no, I'm not gonna even send those out to review how would my reviewers Even have a way of ascertaining the worth of your arguments if they're not familiar with any of the work that you're citing Because you're not citing things that are part of the conversation that has gone on in that journal or in related journals At this point we should have three paragraphs paragraph one What's the big picture issue? What's the big picture problem? What's the diamond paragraphs two and three? What's the specific academic entrance? What is the specific facet of the diamond that you are addressing and why is that an important dynamic for us to look at? The final paragraph of your introduction should be the purpose of the study. In other words the first sentence Might even be very explicit and say something like in the study I plan to investigate or this study's purpose is to Or whatever it might be some people really like having that very explicitly stated some people don't I think that again You kind of stress out what your journal is looking for and you kind of go from there But if you do have that you would have that as your first sentence of the paragraph the purpose of your study and that purpose of your study should be addressing The problem that you mentioned in paragraph one and use the language of paragraphs two and three To formulate the research purpose because that research purpose isn't inevitably going to be the thing that informs the argument of your paper or the Hypotheses that you're testing or the research questions that you're exploring right the rest of that paragraph then Should be an overview of the major components of your paper the theories concepts that you're using the methods and it should also be an introduction To the insights that are going to be a part of your results or findings now This can be a little bit tricky because if you're like me and you eat everything on your plate one thing at a time And you also start your research articles by writing the introduction and you will not have Findings or results to put in that introduction yet. That's okay If you want to you can go ahead and write your introduction out have that first sentence of your fourth paragraph But then leave the rest of it blank as sort of a placeholder or you can not even write the introduction until you finish the study and then you go back and write the introduction Now that's not say that you should be doing things like formulating your hypotheses after you get your results You should have your formal hypotheses should have your literature that informs them before you run your statistical tests But your introduction's purpose is really as a hook for your reader into your research it in of itself is not the thing forwarding a hypothesis So if you want to write that last that's fine too either way that you do it though making sure that final paragraph is Setting up what you're doing in the rest of the study and also you know kind of teasing your reader Hey, I found some cool stuff here if you read the rest of this paper You're going to come away with some really cool knowledge that you didn't have before sweet right that's good writing is you doing enough To inform your reader to be at the same place that you are in that paper while at the same time Giving them a reason to continue to read the rest of your work overall then your introduction's purpose is to make it stand out And I don't mean stand out in some sort of sensationalist clip baitie way But to really communicate to your reader why your work is important and why they should read because again It's competing with so many other things in that instructors time chairs time reviewers time that you need to make the case that your work Is worth their time and energy and resources to read so as we finish then I've got two things that I think that you can take away To help you write stronger introductions the first of which is writing a bad introduction Is better than not writing an introduction at all and what I mean by that is is that I think a lot of times people sit down They've read all this literature maybe they've already completed their study right whatever it might be but they sit down and They look at the paper and it's blank and they just go oh my god. What am I going to do? What am I going to say and they write a sentence and they go wow and that's stupid That's a bad sentence and they delete it and they write another sentence. Oh, I hate that too Then they delete that and they just oh they just never get on because just the idea of this is the start of my paper is Incredibly daunting. I would say that in that case I know that I said that cliche or filler phrases are a sign of a bad introduction and they are But in that case it's better for you to write a bad cliche phrase Just to sort of get your gears moving and for you to get something on the page and for you to move beyond the terror of a blank page. It's more important for you to do that, then it is for you to write the perfect first sentence. I oftentimes find whenever I'm reviewing student's work or client's work that in their first paragraph, their first sentence is crap, their second sentence, F5050, their third sentence though. Man, that's the one. That's the one that they should have had as the thesis statement, the first sentence of that paragraph, and the first sentence of that entire paper. It just took them a little bit to get that engine started to get to ramp up a little bit and then to get to that third sentence. That's the whole point of editing. We talked about this in the previous episode. The point of editing is to make good writing better. That's the key ingredient between good writing and excellent writing. I know that in math you're supposed to show all of your work. In writing though, you hide that. You hide all of the little imperfections that you had along the way. That's the editing process. Whenever you sit down and you go to write your introduction, just write it. Just write anything because writing then provides you an entrance into editing. Don't sit there and just be terrified by trying to start. Whatever project it is that you're working on. The second thing that I would say to do is if you're really having trouble visualizing what good introductions look like. Take two or three published papers from the journal that you're trying to submit to or the fuels of study that you're trying to be a part of or whatever it might be but try to find two or three papers that are pretty closely aligned with one another. I want you to look at their introductions. I want you to look not for content. It's less important for you to know what it is that they're writing about. Instead, I want you to focus on how are they writing this? What sort of structure are they using? How are they making claims? What's the function of each sentence in their paragraphs? By doing that, by being able to identify how people are constructing an argument in a way that encourages you as the reader to be a part of the conversation, to read their work, then you can start to emulate those things. For example, if someone starts to play a musical instrument, they don't start by playing their own music. They don't start composing their own music as a way of beginning their journey of mastering whatever instrument it is that they're learning how to play. What they do first is they find very established songs and they emulate those songs. They practice those songs until they get to the point to where they are able to understand not just what the music is but what the choices were that animate the musical piece. And then once you start to understand that, then you can compose your own music. It's the same thing here. You are trying to identify what is important out of the introductions to pieces that resonate with you, that speak to you. And then from that, you're distilling those down to their constitutive parts to where now you've mastered what's going on there and you can write your own introductions and put your own sort of flare on it. That's the cool thing is that after a while you start to develop your own style of writing because you've moved beyond simply imitating or imulating people who have done these things before you and now you as a master of your craft are starting to create those things on your own. All right, so that's going to be it for me today. I'm always interested in the practices, habits, rituals that you can share with the rest of us. So that way we can all grow to be better writers. So if you have any tips or tricks or anything that you would like to share, drop me a line. Let me know. So that way I can pass it on to my own students or my own clients or talk about it and give you a shout out on an episode where we cover this again. Also, I've talked about the clients that I work with on their writing and I have openings to take on more clients. If you're interested in getting some advice on whatever project that it is that you're working on, whether that's for article for publication, thesis or dissertation, whatever it might be. I'm starting that off by offering the first five people who reach out to me a free 30-minute consultation on whatever it is that they want to talk about related to their writing. That might be talking through an idea, talking through an outline for a project or specific feedback that you've gotten from a reviewer, from an editor that you might want to talk through. Whatever it might be, I'm happy to do that. And if you want to develop a more ongoing relationship after that, I'm happy to talk about my rates to work with people across weeks or months to make sure that you get your work out there and published. So thanks again and I'll see you in the next episode. Hey writers, what's stopping your best ideas from becoming your next big publication? Broyan ideas shouldn't die in your drafts folder. Now's the time to bridge the gap between the possible and the published. If you have the time, I'd really appreciate it if you would subscribe to the podcast. Leave a positive review. Assign us to your classes or share it with a colleague. All those things help get the word out and let me know what I can do to make this podcast the best resource for you. Also, if you'd like to set up a time to chat with me about your next big idea, then you can find my information in the podcast description where you can schedule a time. So until then, keep healthy, keep writing and don't let reviewer to get you down.