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To become a strong disciplinary-specific writer, researchers need to first become good scientific readers. This section introduces a set of reading-to-write tools that are needed for producing an effective Introduction section. In other words, by using key tools as analytical aids when reading articles, writers can gain a heightened awareness of how to write articles with similar conventions. In this way, researchers can read articles with duo purposes—reading to develop content expertise alongside disciplinary writing expertise. The tools will thus help with time efficiency and writing productivity by facilitating the development of analytical skills, the increased awareness of how words shape meaning, and the transfer of that knowledge to communicating research clearly and effectively in writing.

There are different tools for each section of the research article, and all these tools can be categorized into three sets: goals, strategies, and language use. Goals are used to communicate your overall argumentative intent. Strategies are used to achieve your goals, and Language Use connects the goals and strategies in meaningful ways to enable explicit and cohesive expression of ideas. The following sections describe each of the tools, but it is first important to note that the use of these tools is dependent on variations across and within disciplines and changes in personal styles of writing. The objective is not to confine you to a toolbox but to enable you with analytical resources that can expand your understanding of writing and develop your writing skills.

1. There are three overarching goals of an Introduction section. What do you think they are?
2. What common language expressions (e.g., recent research has investigated…) have you used in Introductions? Why are these expressions important?

Communicative Goals in Introductions

The first set of tools is called Goals, which help to communicate the overall argumentative intent in the Introduction section. As the overall purpose of Introductions is to establish a strong argument, three major goals need to be fulfilled to realize this general purpose. Do you remember the funnel introduced earlier? Now we will contextualize these three goals within the Introduction’s wide-to-narrow funnel format. While we introduce these goals linearly, your writing may not follow this linear pattern. We will discuss this more as we continue to further sections. It is also important to take note of the colors used for the funnel. These colors are metaphorical representations of the content we expect to see when achieving each goal. As we move from the level of Goals to Strategies, these abstract metaphors will be paired with concrete Language Use features to help you better understand the composition of research in your field. Let’s take a closer look at these Goals before we provide you with Strategies for achieving these Goals!

Goal One: Establish a Territory  

The first Goal that we will introduce is to Establish a Territory. The purpose of this Goal is to portray the bigger picture of the research topic to the target audience. This Goal is analogous to envisioning an expansive, BLUE sky with some clouds. This blue sky represents the most recent and relevant literature that is needed to establish your research topic area—or your research territory. Clouds in the sky begin to suggest a lack of clarity in the topic area. By establishing your research territory, you can demonstrate knowledge of your topic and claim its relevance in the field while helping to segue into a research niche, or Goal 2: Indicate a Niche.

It is often hard to determine how much of the research territory needs to be communicated in the Introduction. There are a couple of points to consider here. First, start with the most recent literature (work from the past five years) and relevant literature (work that is closely related to your main topic area). If you start to see some of the same work cited in your initial collection of articles, you can then begin to expand your scope. Second, avoid including peripheral topics (information that does not directly contribute to your central argument). Peripheral information may distract from your claims and over-complicate your research argument. 

Goal Two: Indicate a Niche 

To understand the Goal, Indicate a Niche, let us continue with the same sky metaphor. Across the blue sky, clouds may make the view unclear. This lack of clarity should raise concern, which we represent metaphorically as a RED light. Stop! Warning! Thus, the purpose of this goal is to explicitly call attention to problems in the field or topic area. The red here can also be seen as the heart of an argument. It is important to introduce the heart of your argument as quickly as possible in your writing so that your text is not too blue. In other words, if your writing starts with a substantial amount of information to establish a research territory, the text will be perceived as descriptive rather than argumentative.

A great tip is to try your best to get into the RED of your argument as quickly as possible. If you can Indicate a Niche before the end of your first paragraph or beginning of your second, you will ensure that your reader understands the central claims in your argumentation.

Goal Three: Address the Niche 

Once you have established your territory and indicated your niche, you are likely ready to Address the Niche. The purpose of this Goal is to highlight how your work will directly add new knowledge to your research territory (the BLUE sky) and attend to the concerns raised within the territory (the RED light). Once you communicate these points, you can begin flashing your GREEN light. Green means GO! Go for it! Show your reader how your work will contribute new knowledge to the field. This goal is where you address the niche by stating your research purpose, value, structure, or even research outcomes. We will discuss these strategies in the following sections.

The structure of the Introduction is usually from general to specific. Although this is a very typical organization, this organization is not mandatory. While many researcher writers begin their Introduction with Establish a Territory, others jump right into Indicate a Niche, often because the problem they intend to address is well-known or widespread. It is rare to begin an Introduction with Address the Niche, although some writers choose this organizational scheme, which is especially common when writing Abstracts.

Writing Strategies for Achieving Goals in the Introduction

In the next sections, you will learn about the EIGHT Strategies that will help you achieve the three Goals of Introductions. These Strategies will be useful for (1) analyzing model articles by visualizing how published authors achieve their communicative goals and (2) facilitating your writing process by helping you utilize similar strategies while maintaining your individual style and identity as a researcher. In this section, we will also provide examples of the Language Use for realizing each of the strategies.

Writing Strategies for Establish a Territory

As was mentioned in the previous section, the purpose of Establishing a Territory is to demonstrate knowledge of your topic and its relevance in your field. You can achieve this Goal by using two main writing Strategies: Claim Centrality and Provide Background.

Writing Strategies for Claim Centrality

Claim Centrality is to help grab your reader’s attention. This strategy is used to claim that your topic is interesting, important, and/or prominent in the field. How could you claim the centrality of your research topic? As you might have correctly guessed, Language Use is the key in producing cohesive and explicit messaging. In other words, Language Use helps you connect Goals and Strategies to achieve a meaningful, well-structured text. To understand this better let us look at several examples:

a. “Recent research on artificial intelligence has generated great interest in the Internet of Things, or IoT.”

b. “The importance of investigating interactions, including gestures along with speech between teachers and students, is increasingly recognized.”

c. “Over the past 40 years, one of the most extensively researched topics in second language acquisition has been the role of conversational interaction.”

In example a, the bolded words are used to highlight recent interest in the research topic. Example b argues for the topic’s importance, and in example c, the bolded words identify the topic as prominent. The language of interest, importance, and prominence can be used to suggest the value of the broad research area, to segue into some general information or previous research in the area, and also to foreground a problem. In the examples above, the bolded words represent explicit patterns in Language Use. These patterns are NOT discipline-specific. They can be used by any scientist to communicate with other scientists. You have likely seen these patterns while reading, but understanding the purpose of these patterns or how these patterns are used to achieve specific Goals and Strategies should raise your awareness of the role language has in communicating an argument.

When using Language Use patterns in your writing, there are some important points to understand. First, patterns should not reflect the ideas of researchers. Ideas of researchers should be adequately cited using your discipline’s citation style of choice. If you do not cite the work of researchers appropriately, this is called plagiarism! Plagiarism is a major academic integrity issue, and your work could be immediately rejected. Second, it is important that you do not read a single article and pull multiple Language Use patterns into your writing from that article. It is best to note patterns from a wide number of articles and use the patterns you identify to begin forming your writing style. As you develop as a research writer, you will become increasingly less reliant on the patterns of other writers and more autonomous in creating patterns of your own.

Following is a list of the Language Use patterns for Claim Centrality. Be on the lookout for more as you analyze articles in your field.

Writing Strategies for Provide Background

To successfully utilize this strategy, the following language patterns might come in handy, but there are many more patterns to be found in published articles.

Do not feel obligated to use both of the strategies Claim Centrality and Provide Background since their use depends on your writing style. After analyzing model articles in your field and on topics in your research territory, you will learn which strategies are frequently used so you can follow a similar structure. With this said, Claim Centrality is very common. You will usually find this Strategy in the first sentence of the Introduction sections. Provide Background is a more prominent Strategy. It is rather safe to say that this Strategy is obligatory.

Summary: Establish a Territory

Let us recap the Goal of Establishing a Territory:

1. Establish a Territory is used to foreground what is generally known and what has been previously researched in the field. It also emphasizes what is central and significant in the field. Referencing literature for different purposes is also frequent in this Introduction goal.
2. The Strategies that can help achieve this Goal include Claim Centrality and Providing Background.
3. The Language Use must tie together the Goal of Establishing a Territory with its Strategies in an explicit way so that your readers do not have to “read in-between the lines” or make inferences you do not intend to communicate.

If you want to communicate that your topic is valuable, you should use language that expresses interest, importance, or prominence. If you want to describe shared knowledge, you should state general information or conceptual frameworks. If you want to describe a research tradition, you should synthesize previous research on the topic.

Writing Strategies for Problematize Research

Problematize Research is a Strategy that is used to explicitly indicate the problematic area of the research territory that motivates your study. It is important that the information highlighted through this Strategy is an accurate representation of the research territory and that your research aims directly address your claims in red. You can problematize the research in your established territory using several sub-strategies:

• • indicate a gap in the targeted research or domain of practice;
  • highlight a concern that is theoretical, methodological, empirical, or practical;
  • raise general questions that are lingering in the research; and
  • pose general hypotheses that lack empirical evidence.

The last two sub-strategies are not the actual research questions and hypotheses that are specific to the study. Rather, they indicate general reflections about the field that trigger your audiences’ attention. To understand this distinction between general and study-specific questions/hypotheses, let’s take a look at the Language Use for fulfilling the bigger Goal of Indicate a Niche in Introductions.

The first sub-strategy is to indicate a gap in research. This sub-strategy is specific to knowledge gaps in the existing research space, also known as the targeted research or domain of practice. Let us look at an example:

a. “We could find no empirical work on how native language abilities influence scholarly writing skills.”

In this sentence, the bolded words can help explicitly indicate a gap. Note that the authors make a strong claim by stating “no empirical work.” The strong language would be appropriate to use if authors are 100% certain about their claims. Otherwise, this level of certainty is easy to refute and can be the grounds for immediate criticism if not an accurate representation of the existing research.

The second sub-strategy is to highlight a concern that is theoretical, methodological, empirically, or even practical. The concern is usually inferred from established theory or previous research, but it can be built from practical experiences as well.

When the concerns are practical in nature, it is important to support claims about the practical concerns with literature that also suggests the concern is worthy of research. For example, practical concerns in industry or in the classroom may be context specific. An argument needs to be made that the concern goes beyond a specific-context and is relevant to a broader target audience.

Here is an example of Language Use to highlight a concern:

b. “The literature on scientific writing, however, provides little guidance on how technology facilitates the writing process.”

In this sentence, “little guidance” is a clear indicator of a problem, but notice the word “however.” However is a very strong transition word that typically introduces something negative. Because this word is so useful, it can be overused. Since there are many ways to express a concern, try your best to only use however just once in your entire Introduction section to reduce repetition and redundancy.

The next sub-strategies are to raise general questions and pose general hypotheses that are used to ask questions that draw audiences’ attention to general issues or to possible future findings, or potential implications that arise from current knowledge. Hence, they do not represent your research specific questions or hypotheses and are merely general lingering questions or hypotheses that have not yet been addressed or that lack empirical evidence. Here is an example of a general (rhetorical) question embedded within a sentence:

c. “A key question is whether trade-off effects, common in the literature, will be found when looking at individual performances.”

By saying “A key question,” the reader’s interest and attention may be slightly more elevated.

Now, here is an example of a general hypothesis.

d. “It is possible that differences found between university students are confounded by socioeconomic status (SES).”

This example introduces a tentative foundation for possible research, implying that insufficient evidence exists to support topic-related claims. To communicate general hypotheses, it is very common to use modal verbs. Modal verbs are verbs such as: should, would, could, can, may, might, shall, will, and must. These verbs tend to modify the level of certainty by which you express your hypothesis. They are used to show if your hypothesis is certain, probable, or possible (or not). Hence, your degree of certainty would impact the modal verb you choose.

Below are some more Language Use patterns that are used to Problematize Research.

Strategies of Indicate a Niche are often used together to segue into the present research. Using more than one sub-strategy to problematize research will offer stronger argumentation. For example, a gap in knowledge doesn’t mean anyone wants to fill that gap, but if a gap is coupled with a methodological concern, all of the sudden the problem within the research territory is more profound. Researchers often combine strategies in the BLUE with those in the RED to strengthen argumentation. For example, if a topic is central to the field (Claim Centrality) but there is a significant practical concern (Problematize Research), these Strategies used together can offer a nice segue into your research topic.

Writing Strategies for Indicating a Niche

As discussed above, Indicate a Niche can be signified by the color red, which stands for warning, caution, or stop. The Goal of Indicate a Niche is to communicate limitations or incompleteness in the current state-of-the-art. This communicative Goal helps express your own voice by arguing that there is a need for action in the field. With this Goal, you can situate your research and establish your scholarly position in the field. Two key writing Strategies can help you achieve this Goal effectively, namely Problematize Research and Present Justification.

Writing Strategies for Present Justification

Present Justification is an excellent means of segueing into your specific study. This strategy is used to further emphasize a call for action by suggesting that the gap, problem, question, or hypothesis needs to be addressed. This Strategy is also effective for substantiating the importance of action and raising awareness of the potential benefits of taking action.

Let’s look at an example where a justification is presented to emphasize or rationalize a call for action that stems from the indicated niche.

a. “Because writing is key to many learners’ success at the university level, a better understanding of writing development for this population is highly relevant.”

Please note that the example above starts with because as a way to rationalize what comes next in the sentence: “a better understanding of…is highly relevant.” In this example, since the author has made the justification for why research is needed, they can move on to provide more specific details about their research. Here is another example:

b. “Given these gaps in the previous research, there is clearly a need for more fine-grained analyses of writing improvement.”

This example shows how one sentence can address multiple Goals by first re-indicating the gap to connect the research justification, making for strong cohesion between ideas. The sentence also includes the phrase “there is clearly a need for” suggesting an indisputable argument for why the present study is necessary. Here, we can better understand the importance of transitions.

Transitions help to connect ideas. In some cases, they may be just one word. For example, thus and therefore, are used regularly when presenting a justification whereas however is often used when indicating a gap or highlighting a problem. Transitions can also be a whole introductory phrase, like in the previous example “Given the gaps in the previous research.” This style of transition is what we call old and new information. Every sentence contains at least one idea. Once you read a sentence, that idea is then “old” information. You can use the old information to segue into new information that comes in a proceeding sentence or clause. In example b, the new information is the justification as reflected in “there is clearly a need for.” This is also the most important information in the sentence, thus it is in the main clause of the sentence.

If you have multiple claims and subclaims to set up your central research argument, you may see multiple cycles of BLUE and RED. The order of ideas across these cycles should have a clear organizational structure. For example, you might organize your claims in terms of hierarchy in importance or chronology. You may also consider the general-to-specific organization presented earlier. The structure you choose in the Introduction should represent the organizational structure in a separate Literature Review (if this section is typical in your field).

We will return to transitions and cycles of argumentation later in this book. For now, here are some more examples of Language Use for Present Justification.

Summary: Indicate a Niche

Let us recap the Goal of Indicate a Niche:

1. Remember that the Goal of Indicate a Niche is to communicate limitations or incompleteness in the current state-of-the-art. This Goal is very effective for helping express your voice by arguing that there is a need for action in the field.
2. Although it is common to present the Goal of Establishing the Territory BEFORE Indicate a Niche, in some cases, you may want to jump right into the heart of the argument by starting with Language Use to Indicate a Niche. This is especially common when the problem is well-known across multiple disciplines or a general audience.
3. Some research mentors suggest including the RED of your argument no later than the 2nd or 3rd sentence in your Introduction. This style is especially true for grant writing. Again, the choice is dependent on your discipline and your own writing preference.
4. The Strategies to achieve the Goal of Indicating a Niche include Problematize Research and Present Justification. Problematize Research also includes sub-strategies of indicating a gap, highlighting a problem, raising general questions, and posing general hypotheses.
5. Language Use should be explicit for the reader. You do not want your reader to guess or make inferences about what you mean.

Writing Strategies for Addressing the Niche

As was discussed previously, the GREEN color stands for how you address the concerns in the field. Green means go and grow! In other words, the Goal here is to contribute to the existing literature and help develop the knowledge in your field. This goal is achieved by previewing what is to come in your research article and by highlighting essential elements of the study. There are four key writing Strategies that are often used to Address the Niche; namely Announce the Purpose, Highlight Study Specifics, State the Value of Research, and Outline the Structure. None of these strategies are obligatory, but using a combination of several strategies can strengthen your communicative intent in this stage of the Introduction.

Writing Strategies for State Value of Present Research

When the Goal is to Address the Niche, one of the most effective strategies to communicate the importance of your work is to State the Value of the Present Research. This strategy is used to express the main essence of your entire study; the answer to the “so what?” question. As researchers, your desire should be to move the field forward, so it should be important to make a statement as to how exactly your work accomplishes this. It is common for novice research writers to make their value statement implicit, requiring readers to read in-between the lines. You must avoid this, as it is crucial to be direct, as long as your contribution statement is justified. Hence, stating the value or contribution of research should be done very explicitly.

Here are a few examples of Language Use patterns for State the Value of the Present Research. Please read through the following examples carefully.

a. “This paper contributes to this burgeoning research area by outlining how corpus linguistics tools and methods can be usefully applied to studies of language ideology.”

b. “The study extends previous research by using multiple measures to assess writing development and by comparing the impact of different settings.”

c. “Our study deepens these calls for more mode-balanced agendas.”

Notice the explicit language and the use of present tense verbs contributes, extends, deepens. Below are a few more examples of this sub-strategy, and we will see more as we introduce Strategies in the Discussion/Conclusion.

Writing Strategies for Outline Structure

The final strategy that you may use in the Introduction is Outline the Structure of the Research. This strategy is used in some disciplines more than others and is more prevalent in long dissertations or theses than journal articles. The reason to outline the structure is to guide the reader through the argument and inform the reader of the organization of the proceeding content. This strategy is very effective when your paper is dense, or if you want to be sure your reader understands the logic behind your research organization. By including an outline, or roadmap into the rest of the text, you can also establish cohesion in your paper as a whole.

Below are some Language Use patterns that may appear in research articles as well as longer manuscripts.

Language Use patterns can be used in two ways: (1) as a springboard for forming your sentence structures that communicate a specific meaning or (2) as a placeholder to allow you to continue writing without cognitive overload. When you include language that expresses an idea from someone else’s research, you MUST cite their work to avoid plagiarism.

Writing Strategies for Announce Purpose

Announce Purpose is where you introduce the intent of the study along with some of its main features such as methodological design. Here, you can acquaint the reader with the gist of the study by focusing on the study description, as in this study examines/presents/reports. We can also inform the reader of the scientific intent, focusing on the purpose statement, such as the aim/purpose/objective is to examine/present/report.

The Strategy of Announcing the Purpose introduces your research descriptively or purposefully to your audience. If it is important to you to communicate the gist of your study, you may be more descriptive of what your research is about. Here is an example where Announce the Purpose is used to describe the gist of research:

• “The present study examined test-takers’ feedback by conducting and analyzing individual interviews that probed the participants’ perceptions, reactions, attitudes, and processes.”

This purpose statement summarizes the gist of the study nicely. Notice that the past tense “examined” is used in the example. Past tense is common in this strategy because the study was already conducted. Oftentimes, writers use the present (e.g., This study examines…) or future tense (This study will introduce…) to reflect what the study is about or what the study will demonstrate in later sections. The key would be to remain consistent in verb tense usage when you Address the Niche.

If you choose to introduce your research purposefully, you need to use a true purpose statement. The key characteristic of this strategy is the use of infinitive verbs. Take a look at the following example:

• “The main purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of the difficult effects of research writing training on graduate students’ writing development.”

In this example, the researcher’s intent is explicit due to the use of direct pointers such as “the main purpose” and the infinitive verb “to gain.”

In what follows, we present some common language use patterns that can be used to announce research both descriptively and purposefully:

Writing Strategies for Highlight Study Specifics

Highlight Study Specifics can be achieved by bringing in specifics from your Methods and Results. Essentially, any information that you might see in the Methods or Results section that is relevant to your research contributions can be fronted in this stage of the Introduction. What to include here largely depends on your take-home messages, or the central messages you hope to communicate to your reader about your research. This strategy is realized using four main sub-strategies:

• present research questions and/or hypotheses,

• clarify definitions,

• summarize methods, and

• announcing principal outcomes.

Let’s take a look first at the Language Use patterns for present research questions and hypotheses. Formulating strong research questions and hypotheses is a very strong sub-strategy that can be used to clarify what specifically you are investigating. If you do not have enough experience formulating questions and hypotheses, you must consult a research mentor to make sure your questions are clear, concise, focused, and arguable.

Although you might see simple yes/no questions in published research articles, these questions should be avoided unless they are truly appropriate for your research. Open-ended questions, or wh-questions such as the ones that start with what, why, and how are often more useful research questions to pose. Ultimately, the type of questions depends on the nature of your research.

Research questions are often written as direct questions, but they can also be presented in rhetorical statements such as in the following example:

a. “In the work presented here, we investigate whether the precision of the A contributes to the development of B.”

The question in example a is similar to the general rhetorical questions that you might pose as a sub-strategy in Goal – Indicate a Niche and Strategy – Problematize Research. However, the difference is that the question in this example is a specific and arguable question that is awaiting specific answers via the present study. Hypotheses on the other hand are statements to introduce the assumptions to be tested or speculations about potential outcomes of the study.

The next sub-strategy is to clarify definitions. It is essential that you clearly define key terms or constructs at some point in your study if these definitions represent a unique epistemological lens through which your study is conducted. Definitions of constructs are also important if they are divergent from those in other fields or from different theoretical perspectives. Clarifying definitions, also known as operationalizing constructs, is especially important when you are measuring variables that are defined differently across studies, are a bit arbitrary, are not directly observable, or may even be quite complex for your audience to understand. By clarifying your definitions, you can avoid misinterpretations of your work due to unfamiliar terminology. This sub-strategy also helps increase the quality of the results and improve the robustness of your research design.

Terminology in your study may be general concepts or measurable constructs. For general concepts, you may provide a conceptual definition that provides meaning but is still abstract or theoretical. Measurable constructs, on the other hand, are the ones that you intend to investigate in your study. These need to be operationalized so that the definition is clear and the procedures used to measure the construct become concrete. Here is an example:

b. “The conceptual definition of Development is—the process of growing”

The definition in this example is vague and unmeasurable, hence can be transferred to multiple contexts. This type of definition can be used as long as the author does not intend to measure “development” as a construct.

To strengthen your operational definition, it is important to review the relevant literature with the aim of (1) finding how other research defines the same construct, (2) accurately capturing the intended construct (3) improving the validity of your research, and (4) strengthening your rationale for choosing the definition that you choose.

Another common sub-strategy is to summarize methods. This sub-strategy is most typically used when there is a methodological contribution or if the methods are unique to your study. You may also want to summarize methods to simply preview what will come next in your research. Summarizing methods in the Introduction may also help to begin establishing the credibility of your study, which will help to answer some questions the readers may have about your take-home messages, your overall arguments, or your principal results.

The next sub-strategy that you can use to introduce study specifics is to announce principal outcomes. This strategy is quite common in many disciplines, but it is not obligatory. A common reason for announcing outcomes in the Introduction is to transition into the value of your study or to preview a more detailed presentation of the results.

The Language Use patterns that you can use to highlight study specifics will be discussed in later chapters when Methods and Results are presented. However, we encourage you to analyze some sample articles from your field and in your research topic to discover the Language Use patterns. You may notice that these strategies are either extensively used, briefly described, or non-existent.

Summary: Address the Niche

Let us recap the Goal of Addressing the Niche:

1. Address the Niche is represented metaphorically using the color GREEN, which represents growth or continuation. This Goal is used to communicate how your research will contribute to existing literature and/or address concerns in the field. This Goal is very effective for helping preview your research by highlighting essential elements of your study.
2. Although it is common to see details of your study at the very end of the Introduction section, the GREEN may be discussed in a cyclical pattern if the study has more than one argument. That is, If you have multiple arguments to set up your research, you may see multiple cycles of BLUE-RED-GREEN or variations thereof.
3. The language you use should still be explicit for the reader to prevent guessing or making inferences about your communicative intent.
4. There are four key writing strategies that are often used to realize this Goal. These strategies are not obligatory, but by using a combination of several strategies, you can strengthen your communication.

• • Announce Purpose is used to introduce the main features of the study, focusing on the general study description and/or the purpose statement.
  • Highlight Study Specifics can be achieved in many ways like:
    • presenting research questions and research hypotheses to introduce points of emphasis in the study or main concepts to be tested,
    • clarifying definitions to provide the direct meaning of terminology or constructs, and
    • summarizing methods and announcing principal outcomes to point out key details of the study to preview what’s going on later in the paper.
  • State Contributions emphasize the importance or value of the study.
  • Outline the Structure guides the reader through the content of the paper.