Writing a Dissertation:
The Introduction
From our: Dissertation Writing guide.
The introduction to your dissertation is one of the most important chapters of all. It is unlikely to be the first section that you finalise. However, it will be the first section that any readers will read.
It therefore needs to set your scene, and explain what you are going to study and why you wanted to study it. It also needs to make clear why your work matters, and what it will add to knowledge about the topic area.
It is therefore important to approach your introduction in the right way. This page explains more about what you should include, and also how you might go about starting to write the introduction to your dissertation.
Getting Started
It is a good idea only to finalise your introduction once you have completed the rest of your dissertation.
However, you need to start it much sooner. Ideally, you should write a first draft of your introduction very early on, perhaps as early as when you submit your research proposal.
This draft should set out a broad outline of your ideas, why you want to study this area, and what you hope to explore and/or establish.
You can, and should, update your introduction several times as your ideas develop.
It is probably ideal to review it after you have carried out your literature review. It may also be worth looking again both before you start and after you complete your practical research.
You should then update it again when you start to write your dissertation in full, and finally once the dissertation is complete.
Why? Because keeping the introduction in mind will help you to ensure that your research stays on track.
The Content of Your Introduction
The introduction provides the rationale for your dissertation, thesis or other research project: what you are trying to answer and why it is important to do this research.
Your introduction should therefore contain a clear statement of the research question and the aims of the research (closely related to the question). You do not need separate headings or sections for either of these.
However, they need to be clearly stated, so that a casual reader can find them easily. As much as anything else, this will help your supervisor when they come to mark your dissertation, because they can clearly see your research question and objectives.
The introduction should also introduce and briefly review the literature on your topic to show what is already known and explain the theoretical framework.
If there are theoretical debates in the literature, then the introduction is a good place for you to give your own perspective in conjunction with the literature review section of the dissertation. However, you do not need to give a detailed review of the literature: that should be reserved for your literature review. A broad-brush picture of the main issues and debates is sufficient.
Finally, the introduction should indicate how your research will contribute to the theoretical understanding of the topic and/or provide practical ideas and recommendations for practitioners, policy-makers or others in the field.
Top Tip!
It is worth having a look at some other dissertations in your field, to see how previous authors have approached their introductions.
You can find published theses through your university library. If your university does not usually publish theses, you could ask your supervisor if they can show you drafts or final versions of dissertations produced by their previous students.
Drawing on your Research Proposal
The introduction to your dissertation or thesis will probably draw heavily on your research proposal.
If you haven't already written a research proposal, see our page Writing a Research Proposal for some ideas.
This is because, like a research proposal, the introduction needs to set the scene for the later work and give a broad idea of the arguments and/or research that preceded yours.
It should also give some idea of why you chose to study this area, giving a flavour of the literature, and what you hoped to find out.
Warning!
Don't include too many citations in your introduction: this is your summary of why you want to study this area, and what questions you hope to address. Any citations are only to set the context, and you should leave the bulk of the literature for a later section.
There are, however, some crucial differences between your introduction and your research proposal.
The main one is that you have now completed the work. This means that your introduction can be much clearer about what exactly you chose to investigate and the precise scope of your work.
In other words, you now have the benefit of hindsight, and what you intended is much less important than what actually happened.
A practical point
It may seem reasonable to copy and paste large sections of text from your research proposal into your introduction. After all, your research questions and objectives haven't changed, have they?
Or have they?
Your research proposal was written entirely in the future. It described what you planned to do.
Your introduction describes what you did, which probably wasn't quite the same thing. At the very least, you need to check through and change the tense of what you are writing.
Writing a Strong Introduction
The key to a strong introduction is to remember that, for the reader, the introduction is the start of the journey through your work.
You may have written it last, but they are reading it first. You can give a flavour of the outcomes of your research, but you should not include any detailed results or conclusions. Those are for later.
Some good ideas for making your introduction strong include:
Develop an interesting opening sentence that will hold the attention of your reader.
Don't try to say everything in the introduction, but do outline the broad thrust of your work and argument.
Make sure that you don't promise anything that can't be delivered later.
Keep the language straightforward. Although you should do this throughout, it is especially important for the introduction.
Top Tip:
Your introduction is the reader's 'door' into your thesis or dissertation. It therefore needs to make sense to the non-expert. Ask a friend to read it for you, and see if they can understand it easily.
Another useful option is to ask a large language model such as ChatGPT to suggest ways in which the language could be simplified or made more accessible.
However, be aware that it may alter your meaning. Don't simply accept all its suggestions. Instead, review them carefully before adopting them.
There is more about this, and why it happens, in our pages on Using Large Language Models (LLMs) and Understanding Large Language Models (LLMs).
At the end of the introduction, it is also usual to set out an outline of the rest of the dissertation.
This can be as simple as 'Chapter 2 discusses my chosen methodology, Chapter 3 sets out my results, and Chapter 4 discusses the results and draws conclusions'.
However, if your thesis is ordered by themes, then a more complex outline may be necessary.
How far should you stray into the personal?
Your introduction sets out why you wanted to research a particular area. For some people, that may be more than a simple interest. There may be deeply personal and family-based reasons why you might want to explore support for families with a child with cancer, for example, or for carers of people with dementia.
Should you explain this in the introduction?
It is deeply compelling to understand what drove people to undertake research, and statements like this certainly catch the reader's attention. However, the introduction is part of a piece of academic work. Your dissertation may be otherwise written in the third person, or using the passive voice. It is hard to write something very personal in those terms.
A good tip is: if you are struggling to express what you want to say in a similar tone to the rest of your dissertation, then it may not be appropriate for the introduction.
However, don't abandon it altogether. Instead, consider whether you could include it as a separate foreword, where you can write in a more intimate and informal style.
A Final Thought
As with any other piece of writing, redrafting and editing will improve your text.
This is especially important for the introduction because it needs to hold your reader's attention and lead them into your research.
The best way to ensure that you can do this is to give yourself enough time to write a really good introduction, including several redrafts.
Do not view the introduction as a last minute job.