Brainstorming your Introduction
A helpful technique to capture your ideas is generative writing.
Here are five prompts you can use to capture all the ideas that come up when you think through the key elements of your Introduction
- Why does this study exist?
Why was this research done at all? Why this topic, and what larger gap, problem, uncertainty, or poorly understood area in the field was it meant to contribute to? - What was missing before this study?
Before this work was done, what specific thing was still unknown, unclear, or untested within that larger problem? - What did this study aim to learn or establish?
What exactly was this study trying to determine, test, or clarify? Finish the sentence: “This study asks what / whether / how / to what extent …” - What did this study not attempt to cover?
What related questions or directions were intentionally left out of this paper, even if they are part of the broader project or field? - Why was this approach appropriate?
Why was this particular approach chosen for this study? What made it a reasonable or practical way to address the question, given the constraints?
Tip: Write more than you think you need. Repetition and contradiction are actually helpful at this stage.
Note: in a perfect world, you’ve already captured all your research decisions in a lab notebook or research log. However, most of us don’t live in a perfect world and have to reconstruct things after the fact. That’s normal. As you become a more experienced researcher, you start becoming more aware of the need to capture these decisions early on.