What makes a good introduction for a dissertation? Graduate students practice critiquing one another’s thesis chapters, but they rarely read the introductions — usually because those are written to ...

Authors and editors in the humanities know that journals are more likely to accept scholarly essays with strong introductions and that such essays are more likely to influence academic conversations.

Most importantly, introductions should introduce your paper. Sounds simple, right? But often, students will use the introduction to summarize the topics they will expand in the body of their paper.