The purpose of the introduction is to show your listener what you are doing in your talk. It is also helpful to explain why you are doing it and how you are doing it.
For that reason, there are usually three main parts in the introduction. The most useful description is given by Swales (1990, pp. 137-165)
| Move 1 |
Establishing a research territory
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Move 2 |
Establishing a niche
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Move 3 |
Occupying the niche
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Note particularly the language used in the first two sentences to express Move la.
In many ways, Move 2 is the key move in Introductions. It connects Move 1 (what has been done) to Move 3 (what the present research will do). Move 2 thus establishes the reason for the study. By the end of Move 2, the listener should have a good idea of what is going to come in Move 3.
Move 2s establish a niche by indicating a gap. Probably the most common way to indicate a gap is to use a "negative" subject. Presumably, negative subjects are chosen because they signal immediately to the reader that Move 1 has come to an end. Note the following uses of little and few:
Of course, not all RP Introductions express Move 2 by indicating an obvious gap. You may prefer, for various reasons, to avoid negative comment altogether. In such cases, a useful alternative is to use a contrastive statement.
The third and final step is to show you want to fill the gap (or answer the question) that has been created in Move 2.
Identify the moves in the following introductions:
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THE THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY AND SPECIFIC HEAT OF EPOXY RESIN FROM 0.1 TO 8.0K. We still do not completely understand the thermal properties of glassy materials at low temperatures. We know that the thermal conductivity has a plateau, and this is usually in the range 5 to 10K. We know that below this temperature it is dependent on temperature and it varies approximately as T. But, the specific heat below 4K is much larger than that which would be expected from the Debye theory and it often has an additional term which is proportional to T. We have made some progress towards understanding the thermal behaviour by assuming that there is a cut-off in the photon spectrum at high frequencies. This has been shown by, for example, Zaitlin and Anderson. We also know that there is an additional system of low-lying two-level states. this comes from the work of Anderson and colleagues and Phillips. Nevertheless we need more experimental data and in particular we think it would be useful to make experiments on glassy samples whose properties can be varied slightly from one to the other. In the present investigation, we report our attempts to do this by using various samples of the same epoxy resin which have been subjected to different curing cycles. We have taken measurements of the specific heat (or the diffusing) and the thermal conductivity in the temperature range 0.1 to 80K for a set of specimens which covered up to nine different curing cycles. (Kelham and Rosenburg, 1981) |
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Researchers have studied the communities living in the Malinche
volcano area in the Mexican states of Tlaxcala and Pueblafind and have found an
elaborate system of marking social distance and respect in the morphology of
the language Nahuatl which is spoken there. The research raises questions of
considerable interest for our understanding of the form and function of systems
such as the complexity of the morphology involved, the semantic range of the
elements, and the variation in the system in use raise, both in Nahuatl itself
and in other languages. |
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In recent years applied researchers have become increasingly interested in the interpersonal relationships with manager-subordinate dyads. They have focused on actual similarity between managers and their subordinates as related to managers' appraisals of subordinates' performance (Miles, 1964; Nieva, 1976; Rude, 1970; Senger, 1971), subordinates' job satisfaction (Huber, 1970) and subordinates' evaluations of their managers (Weiss, 1977). Ina few studies, researchers have examined the extent to which subordinates congruently perceive their managers (referred to here as "subordinate's perceptual congruence"). These studies suggest that subordinates who are more perceptually aware of their superiors' work-related attitudes receive higher performance evaluations (Golmieh, 1974; Green, 1972; Labovitz, 1972) and are more satisfied with their superiors (Howard, 1968). But, each of these previous studies has researched only a part of this complex dyadic interpersonal relationship. First, none of the studies has examined the effects of a manager's congruent perception of a subordinate's work-related attitudes (i.e., "manager's perceptual congruence"). Second, no studies can be found that directly compare the relative importance of actual similarity with that of perceptual congruence. Third, none of the previous studies has looked at interpersonal perception by the manager and by the subordinates simultaneously within the same dyad. The purpose of our present field investigation was to study both actual similarity and perceptual congruence and to examine them from the perspective of both the manager and the subordinate. In the study, we investigated the relationships of these perceptual processes in two important organizational outcomes: subordinates' satisfaction with work and supervision, and managers' evaluations of subordinates' job performance. Specifically, we examined: (a) the relative magnitude of perceptual congruence and actual similarity with these two organizational outcomes; (b) whether the more congruently a subordinate perceives the manager (subordinate's perceptual congruence), the more satisfied the subordinate will be; and (c) whether the more congruently a manager perceives the subordinate (manager's perceptual congruence), the higher they will evaluate the subordinate's performance. |
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.