Students are typically taught one of two kinds of introductions: the funnel or the summary. Graduate students rely heavily on the summary introduction, but most scholarly writing uses the history of controversy. It’s very common for a scholarly introduction to use a summary or partition as the last part of a three or four paragraph introduction—these various categories aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. The main work that an introduction does is not, despite what most people say, to tell the reader what the text will be about; it is to persuade the reader that you are pursuing a question of significance to her/his discipline, and that you are equipped to handle it with intelligence, nuance, and fairness.
Because that work needs to be done for the reader, but probably doesn’t need to be done for you, the introduction that enables you to get started may or may not be the one your reader needs—many writers write their introductions last. That isn’t to say they begin with no introduction; they have an introduction that gets them started, and then substitute a different one at the end—I have yet to use the first version of an introduction for anything I’ve written.
As I keep saying, history of controversy is probably the most common introduction in scholarly writing, also called the “literature review.” What one does with that literature review is demonstrate that there is a gap, contradiction, puzzle, or unnecessary tangle. The clear implication is that your work will fill that gap (or describe it usefully), resolve the contradiction, answer the puzzle, and undo the tangle. The history of controversy is often in chronological order, beginning with the earliest relevant scholarship (or with some scholarship that created a sea change). As with the “dawn of time” introduction (which this one resembles when it goes wrong), the difficulty is knowing how far to go back. Dissertations often have much longer literature reviews than books; in books, the literature review is often limited to the introduction (or footnotes). Articles almost always begin with them, although one sometimes sees them at several points along the way.
While you have to argue that there is something missing in (or wrong with) the existing conversation—part of what Gerald Graff aptly calls the “they say, I say” move in scholarly discourse—this move does not necessitate describing everyone prior to you as a benighted idiot. The extent to which one distinguishes one’s work from others’ seems to me to vary even within my own field—some journals are very irenic, and some more agonistic. When one does interdisciplinary work, the boundaries of the literature for which one is responsible are much larger, potentially overwhelmingly so (in fact, one reason that some people never get around to writing, and keep falling for the “I can’t write till I’ve read…” line, is that they haven’t figured out what boundaries to draw). This boundary issue is what rhetoricians call an audience issue—who is the audience? And what are their expectations?
In a way, one can never know, and discovering that there is an obvious book or article that one really should have read is an inevitable, if inevitably shaming, experience. But it’s worth keeping in mind that no one expects a person to have read everything; they do expect a scholar to have read the major relevant works in the field in which the scholar is claiming to be a scholar. What that apparently circular statement means is that there is a kind of recursive question: you need to know the texts relevant to the discussion you are trying to enter, a discussion that is largely defined by the texts you cite. A slightly less circular way to put it is to think about publication venues—what journals or presses are likely places for one’s work? And what texts are most commonly cited in those journals or presses?
Thus, an apparently simple question--how do I write my introduction?—turns out to be difficult to answer if one doesn’t have a sense about where and with whom one is likely to try to publish.[1] My dissertation director once claimed that most writing blocks were the consequence of this failure to identify a specific audience, a failure that resulted in someone trying to write for every possible audience. Since that’s impossible, the person couldn’t write at all. Whether he was right in his quantitative claim, I don’t know, but it seems plausible to me.
Students are typically writing for an audience whom they know reasonably well—the professor from whom they’ve been taking a class for several weeks (if not months). By the time of graduate school, good students are reasonably adept at inferring their audience’s tastes. One reason that the dissertation (or prospectus, if one’s program has that stage) can be so difficult is that it may be one of the first times a student is writing for what rhetoricians call a “composite” audience—multiple readers with different (and sometimes incompatible) expectations. It isn’t just that their actual audience is made up of different faculty members, but faculty often (and quite reasonably) see their role in the dissertation process as helping students write for a broader scholarly audience. So, there is sometimes a kind of ghost audience stalking the process—what the professor imagines the students’ intended audience to be. That it is imagined is no criticism of the faculty member; writing is, as Walter Ong long ago noted, always writing to an imagined construct (which is why we are always surprised at the reactions of actual readers). But students who have become accustomed to writing to the actual audience of the real faculty member now have to adjust to a different sort of audience, and it can be a difficult adjustment.
The both sides introduction is really only a variation on the history of controversy. If the scholarly controversy breaks down into two or more camps, then one might choose to describe those various camps in turn (rather than narrate the scholarly controversy chronologically). This introduction is different from the previous only formally; it requires just as much work, and the same set of decisions (about what conversation one is joining). If, for instance, you are bringing together two disciplinary fields (psychoanalytic studies of literature and quantum physics, for instance), you need to make clear to your readers whether you imagine yourself explaining to people in quantum physics how psychoanalytic approaches to literature are relevant, vice versa, or (most ambitious) one to each other. Keep in mind that this decision about disciplinary conversation is, simultaneously and consequently, a decision about how much secondary for which you will be responsible. The more conversations you plan to enter, the longer your list of secondaries you must know. And trying to enter multiple disciplinary conversations does not necessarily make something, especially a book, more attractive to a publisher.
Academic publishing has never been particularly flush, but presses are in especially hard times right now, because their income is declining both in terms of direct support from universities and in terms of sales. Many are getting less funding than they used to get, and, because university libraries (their major source of sales) are getting less funding, their sales are down. Presses typically have certain areas in which they specialize, and that means that they are more likely to find attractive texts that fit clearly into those areas—the press already sends someone to the relevant conference(s), is well-known among scholars, and is known to libraries for that area. A book with a primary and secondary audience of relevance to a particular press is likely to be attractive; a book with two primary audiences may be hard to market.[2]
The prolepsis or “some say” introduction works especially well for early in a project, when one doesn’t know that whole field well enough to describe the general conversation. One begins by summarizing the main counter-argument, so it’s more or less the exact opposite of a summary introduction. To be effective, the summary of the opposition must be fair; it must be one to which someone who holds that position would assent. It also needs to be a position held either by a famous figure, or by a large number of scholars. Although some friends and I once threatened to put together a journal in which we would publish stupid arguments just so someone else could publish an article arguing sensible positions, no such journal exists. And, even if it, it wouldn’t be a respectable opposition, one that would be seen as worth engaging.
The focusing incident might be characterized as more of a strategy than a form, since it can be used with any of the above introductions. I mention it simply because it’s a way of beginning writing that can work when one is too early in a project to know one’s thesis, let alone to know how one’s argument fits into an existing conversation, or even what conversation one is joining. It’s quite likely that one’s interest in a topic can be encapsulated in a particular moment—a passage in a text, historical incident, event in someone’s life. If that specific incident epitomizes the question that one is pursuing, then it can be a useful way to raise the question. If it’s a significant incident, especially one that is likely to recur, then the implicit or explicit promise that one will describe this kind of incident in an illuminating way makes the exigency claim. If it is an interesting or odd incident, or an engaging narrative, it fulfills the same function that a joke does in Cicero’s taxonomy. While you may be engaged in a potentially confusing or boring topic, you are at least an interesting companion to have on the journey, and may have some interesting narratives along the way.
I sometimes separate out personal narrative although, like the focusing incident it is not structurally different from the other forms. It can be a history of controversy introduction, but instead of trying to describe how the discussion within a particular field has evolved, one describes how one’s own understanding of a topic has evolved. I have used the same introduction when I have begun every book, but it has never appeared in the final version. It is a focusing incident/personal narrative that narrates how I came to do the kind of work I do. It may work to get me writing because it helps me place the specific project in a larger issue I find interesting; when it comes time for the completed manuscript, however, it’s clearly not useful to a community of scholars. Obviously, it functions to get me started writing, and is therefore useful. Someday, perhaps, I will actually publish it.
A few semesters ago, a graduate student in public policy came to see me to work on her writing. I asked her to bring in articles from journals in which she would like to publish, and below is the introduction from one of the articles she gave me. I’ve found this is a useful example for workshops for scholars in the humanities because it is such a different field—we don’t get caught up in the content, but can be more aware of the moves the authors make in setting up their topic, describing their method, and asserting the significance.
A few semesters ago, a graduate student in public policy came to see me to work on her writing. I asked her to bring in articles from journals in which she would like to publish, and below is the introduction from one of the articles she gave me. I’ve found this is a useful example for workshops for scholars in the humanities because it is such a different field—we don’t get caught up in the content, but can be more aware of the moves the authors make in setting up their topic, describing their method, and asserting the significance.
The first sentence summarizes the current disciplinary consensus (a colleague always points out to students that writing such a sentence can require several months’ work, if not more). The second sentence explains that consensus in more detail, simultaneously demonstrating it is a fair summary (through the large number of citations). The last sentence of the paragraph similarly shows that this phenomenon (collaborative efforts among independent parties on water issues) is widespread through a series of examples. This first paragraph, then, does considerable work—summarizing a disciplinary consensus (which, presumably, the authors will complicate in some way) while at the same time demonstrating that their knowledge of the field is broad. The range of examples and number of citations demonstrate that this issue is of importance to scholars and practitioners.
The first sentence of the second paragraph is what John Swales calls a “turn”—the first indication of the specific aspect of the consensus with which the article will be concerned. In this case, the problem the article will pursue is one that is already recognized as a problem in the discipline—“concerns…has [sic] begun to be raised by scholars” (367). The second and third sentences of the second paragraph summarizes one of the policies proposed to solve this problem—“formal adoption”—and the paragraph ends with a potential problem to that policy.
The third paragraph has a clear statement of the contract, implying that this article will “examine the performance of formal, enforceable arrangements among independent parties” (368). The authors mention another problem with these arrangements, and then explicitly state why an empirical study (thereby contracting for a particular method) is of significant interest to the reader. The method is explained in more detail in the fourth paragraph, and the term “compact” is defined (implying that this term is central to the authors’ argument, especially since it was part of the title). The fifth paragraph defines two other terms, conflicts and institutional settings, and then the introduction closes with a sentence that clearly contracts for the topic, significance, and method of the article. Notice that it contracts to offer more understanding and shed light on an issue—the thesis is not clearly stated in the introduction.
The authors’ thesis is clearly stated in the conclusion. The article takes issue with the current consensus on several grounds. While compact commissions “commonly solve conflicts by revising rules” (385, suggesting that unanimity rules are not as high a barrier as literature currently implies), their effectiveness should be compared to conflict resolution in alternative venues. The authors conclude that current practice should significantly change. Obviously, this isn’t my field, so I don’t know if their representation of the field is accurate, but, assuming it is, their case is controversial, and, just as Cicero recommends, they delay their thesis till after they’ve presented their data.
[1] Ironically, given that so many writers work first on what their thesis is and then on where one would publish, it’s easier to write an introduction without knowing one’s thesis than it is to write one without knowing one’s audience. One can write an introduction without knowing either, but it’s almost impossible to write a useful one without knowing what one’s question is.
[2] Probably the single most useful book concerning scholarly publishing, especially for assistant professors, is William Germano’s From Dissertation to Book.
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