Posted on: November 26, 2019 Posted by: Allene Lewis Comments: 0

Writing a thesis is a massive undertaking and can be stressful for even the best students. When you are writing a thesis for your PhD, you know the importance and impact it will have on your education and career. Writing a flawless thesis doesn’t just require your expertise over the topic you are writing on – meanwhile it also requires you to be a good writer. You need to be able to present your thesis in a way that engages the reader and helps them to understand the initial part of your dissertation; that will gradually lead them towards the final conclusion. The introduction chapter plays a very important role in accomplishing this goal.

Here are some tips for writing the dissertation or thesis introduction chapter that will help you ensure that your introduction grabs the attention of the reader.

Purpose of the introduction chapter

Think of the introduction chapter as the setup of the story you will tell in your thesis. You must have thought about your dissertation topic a lot before you chose to start writing your dissertation on it. The introduction chapter allows you to tell the reader why your dissertation is important and why they should read it. Many students are not yet aware of the exact purpose of an introduction chapter. It not only provides the base of the topic and let the reader have a good idea about what the topic is about. In addition, it also provides chunks of information about what research methodologies are going to be used in the essay, and what conclusions are we going to find through our whole research paper. Make sure that your introduction section includes small pieces of information from all chapters, but make sure that you don’t provide enough information in the introduction chapter as it wouldn’t urge our reader to read the remaining dissertation.

Some students ignore the introduction and focus mostly on the findings and conclusion because they think that is what they will mostly be graded on. While this may be true in some cases, but it fails to serve the true purpose of a dissertation or thesis. A thesis isn’t just to get you good grades or to get you a PhD – a thesis exists so that readers can enhance their knowledge though your research. Having a good introduction is necessary to make the thesis useful for everyone.

Write the introduction at the end

Students often end up writing the introduction first and then go on to write the rest of the thesis. While this may seem like an obvious way to write the thesis, since the introduction is the first chapter of the thesis, this can be a wrong approach. Think of it this way – when you research on your topic and get some findings and conclusion, you may find something that contradicts the information in your introduction. Then you can either redo the whole introduction or leave an introduction that will negatively impact how people perceive your thesis.

It is thus a better idea to write the introduction chapter after all the other chapters of your thesis are complete. Once you know what your findings and conclusion are, you will have a better idea of the information you need to provide in the introduction chapter. This has another major advantage – when the readers read your introduction and realise that it perfectly aligns with your conclusion and findings, they will think that you planned out your thesis perfectly. Think of the introduction chapter as the first scene of the movie. If you do it right, then people will be captivated for the whole thesis.

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