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If you have finished taking notes and constructing your final outline, you are ready to write the paper. Don't you love it when someone tells you are 'ready' to do something? Well, we here at the Institute would not lie to you. You ARE ready. While this stage may look overwhelming, keep this idea in mind: each section of your outline is really an essay. Thus, you just need to tie all the essays together with solid transitions. In fact, it is possible to write each section separately, or even out of order, including the introduction, and put them together later. These chapters on writing the paper should help you construct the paper in a methodical way.
Introduction:
The introduction to a research paper is no different than for a long essay. The best introductions follow this simple, repeatable pattern:
- detail
- explanation of issue
- thesis (controlling idea)
1. The opening part should begin with some kind of details, examples, quotes, statistics (if they are interesting), or descriptions. For example, for a paper on teen crime you might begin with one or more anecdotes (short, true stories that prove a point) about a particular teen or group of teens involved in some kind of criminal activity. Or you might begin with a series of facts about teen crime, perhaps including startling statistics. Most topics have loads of possibilities for anecdotes or other details for beginning. This section can be from a few sentences to perhaps as many as 200 words, depending on the length of the paper.
2. The second part of any introduction for a paper is the explanation of the issue. Here you explain what the issue is all about in general terms. By doing this you also explain what the limits of the paper are. This section could take anywhere from a couple of sentences to several.
3. The last part of the introduction is the thesis or controlling idea. This sentence is what your introduction has been leading up to.
The following is a sample introduction from a student paper:
On a warm, sunny day in July of 1999, a family outing in Mystic, Connecticut, turned into a nightmare, as a young five year-old child threatened to commit suicide simply because he was told "no." What could possibly have caused a young child to react in such a manner? Some would say depression, a disease that in recent years has greatly increased in children. As many as 5% of all children in America suffer from depression (Herbst 110). Recently, mental health problems (specifically depression) afflicting children and teenagers have surged into public view, following several terrifying incidents where white, middle class boys went on shooting rampages, killing many in their suburban schools. Some experts think these boys were venting their anger, but revealing the real culprit -depression (Koch 599). The tragic events which unfolded demonstrate the potential consequences of unaddressed mental and emotional problems facing our nation's youth. Depression during childhood can be devastating, if not properly treated. Depression in children and teenagers can be caused by many different factors, varying greatly from case to case. Some of the more common causes include genetics, chemical imbalance, and traumatic experience or abuse (Koch 595). While childhood depression has been recognized only recently, the treatments for it have therefore not had much time to be evaluated. There are, apparently, positive and negative effects of the various kinds of treatments available to date. Thus, treatment of childhood and teenage depression has become quite controversial, as the results and effects vary greatly with each new treatment the medical world introduces.
Notice the student begins with a very specific event, then works her way into the issues surrounding the topic, including some statistics as well as some general facts that figure into her thesis. She leads up to her thesis (last sentence) pretty well. |
