1. Before writing and compiling your Introduction, you are welcome to watch this relatively short but quite informative video called “How to Write a Research Paper Introduction” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTC-5P1VFFU (this link can also be found in the “Videos” folder on our D2L). Watching it will probably increase your range of choices when you’re structuring and refining your Introduction section.

2. Please don’t forget to go through the criteria indicated in the rubric for this assignment (you received its copies at the end of our today’s lesson; besides, it can be found in the “Evaluation Rubrics and Feedback Keys/Codes” folder on our D2L). This will give you a better understanding of the aspects of your writing which will actually be evaluated in this assignment.

3. Even if it follows from the rubric that now you mostly need to work on that part of the Introduction which precedes the literature review, you still need to include in your Introduction section all its necessary components, namely:

• the background information about your research topic;
• a polished and refined literature review of at least those four sources with which you already worked before;
• the research gap; and
• your research question(s) and purposes.

A little bit later following this structure will definitely simplify your work on your upcoming research proposals as well.

4. As well as the previous and the future assignments for our class, your Introduction section should be formatted according to the rules of APA, including the appropriate title page, running head, list of references on a separate page at the end of the section, Times New Roman 12, double-spaced, 0.5”-indented at the beginning of each new paragraph, etc.

5. To improve the quality of your Introductions, you are encouraged to use the Introduction sections of the journal articles which we discussed in class and/or which you worked with for the previous assignments in our class. Your Introductions shouldn’t be much longer or shorter than 2.5-3.5 pages, but the  Introduction sections from those journal articles can give you some additional insights about the optimal ways of structuring/organizing and formatting your Introduction as well as allow you to use a more diverse and appropriate language there, etc. Consulting the related handouts and exercises which we used for this in class earlier and in our today’s class may be helpful in this case too.