In a research paper thesis or project, you will find yourself having to introduce
sections, or themes and sub-themes, and it's important to have
an introductory paragraph, and not just launch into a section.
Particularly if the section is complicated, with seven or eight themes,
if you just jump in and talk about theme one and theme two man theme three it's hard for the reader
to get a big picture so having that introductory paragraph prepares the reader for what's coming
ahead not dissimilar to when you read a chapter in a textbook where they tell you these areas
will be covered although in this case you'll be repeatedly doing this for large sections so let
me give you an example in this specific example the student is introducing previous literature
reviews and so instead of just starting with the reviews there's this short introductory
paragraph which prepares the reader for previous literature reviews have been conducted focusing
on early childhood education technology and each of the studies is listed each of these
reviews will be discussed in turn and they are so this is the first review and then talk about
the second review and it continues so that's a nice simple way to introduce a section in the
second example the student is looking at impact of technology on learning and early childhood
education and there is an introductory paragraph for the subsection literacy and so it goes on to
say this category is included sixteen studies that describe the use of technology to support
the development of a wide range of literacy skills and so the student is setting up what's going to
be discussed ahead include including phonological awareness vocabulary development concepts of print
reading comprehension and general literacy so those five area as will be discussed and then
the student talks about that there's some overlap in the studies and so what you expect then here is
phonological awareness and that's the first section here that is discussed in this case
it's kind of complicated so there's another introductory paragraph because phonological
awareness comprised of quite a few studies so intense studies here so ten studies address
phonological awareness or the ability to analyze the sound structure of language and then specific
sub skills include the ability to break words into syllables smaller units of sound as well
as the ability to blend sounds so that's sort of an overview paragraph again it's just introductory
it's telling the reader what's going to be coming ahead here's another variance here when there's
few studies a few studies to be discussed so it's a way to introduce two or three studies so it says
here this is focusing on numerous in contrast to the number of studies focusing on literacy which
is 16 only three studies focused on numeracy one study was based on robotics while the other two
examined specific online learning programs so that's an introduction a general introduction
to these and then the student actually talks about each of these specific studies in a paragraph each
so that works quite well there's a kind of an overview statement about the studies and what
they're focusing on so it prepares the reader and then each study is talked about in detail
this is a big picture introduction to the actual entire literature review so start
so this literature review provides the context of information literacy development followed by
a description of a framework that results from this study so the student is reviewing certain
areas have been from in literacy and presenting a framework notice that there's actually a visual
here which is a great way to introduce a review of the literature just to give the reader a
really big pictures so the student talks about the first section focuses on the evolution of
information literacy definitions of information literacy that goes on to list each subsection
and then the section the second section reviews and proposes a new framework for understanding
information by underlining outlining the major dimensions and those dimensions are presented
in figure 1 so that's another way to introduce a section in this case the actual entire paper so
there's a number of ways you can do this but you really need to have that introductory paragraph to
prepare the reader for complex sections that are difficult to fall if you just jump right into them