In reading through the introductions there are a number of key points to highlight for your consideration in revision. One thing I noticed that was particularly interesting was that many of you actually widened your topic more than narrowed it. This is not surprising, in fact it is kind of natural. As you familiarize yourself with your interest and learn more of what is out there in your findings there is a natural tendency to want to know everything. There will be a lot of interesting detours and sidetracks that you will likely indulge. However, as you develop your paper you will need to tighten your focus and narrow your inquiry to something that is manageable and gives you a chance of success. Some of that will begin to happen as you dig deeper into your resources and begin discovering what they have to offer. Until then here are some notes.
Development
Use Narrative
One of the best ways to create a hook for any reader is to open with an anecdote or story. Only a few people did this, but those that did has significantly more effective introductions. Everyone should consider opening the paper with the story of how they became fascinated with the topic. It gives you a chance to make the work personal and unique, since no two stories are really ever alike. Sometimes the story might actually be a way to set the stage for what is to come, instead of how you became interested. Equally effective is telling the tale of your inspiration, whether it is racing down the slopes, held with rapt attention by a television show, or a chance conversation with a friend or relative.
Charting the Course to the Topic
Many people bounced around before finally committing to a topic and finding their way to a question. If this was the case, you want to acknowledge that path without indulging every dead end and distraction. Keep the floundering to a smaller portion of your story and build on the successes. They are more interesting, ultimately, anyway. Keep everything that you include relevant to you finding your way to your guiding question.
Focusing on a Tight Targeted Question
Everyone needs to develop some kind of tightly focused question to guide their inquiry. Identifying what it is that you want to learn or know and naming that target is how you will know whether or not you were successful. More than that, you want to give yourself the best chance to be successful. Your introduction should not begin with the question, it should build towards one. Thus, the guiding question should be obvious and clearly stated somewhere toward the end of the introduction. There may be a couple of sub-questions that accompany it, but keep them to a minimum and tighten your focus. You will likely learn a whole lot of additional information, but everything that you find may not make it into the final paper.
Refining Your Opinion
An I-Search does afford you the opportunity to inject some of your opinion. However, you do not want to base the paper on opinions, yours or others. Consequently, the introduction may include some general thoughts and opinions that may have helped lead you to the topic and question, but it is not an editorial. It requires some restraint and so does the research. What is the point of investigating something where you have already made up your mind. A few of you are in danger of this or you may only look for what you already believe to be the case. Either way that makes for a bad experience and paper.
Conventions
Point of View & Contractions
While the “I” in I-Search definitely represents the first person, giving you the freedom to use it, a number of people are resorting to second person (you) for some reason. Using “you” is still bad form. For many of you it is a bad crutch. More than that it actually takes you, the writer, out of things. Keep it personal. When writing use first or third person, not second. Also, you still want to avoid contractions. They are too informal.
Verb Tense
This paper will likely mix the present and the past tense. Remember, present tense is the rule when writing about literature, which may not always be the case with this paper. As a result, when you are writing about experiences, you very well may have to use the past tense, and it makes sens to do so. The trick is to be consistent and keep your tenses straight, so that they make logical sense.
Sentence Structure
With the freedom to write in the first person comes a need for some finesse and attention. You will need to make sentence variety and structure a bit more of a focus, even more than usual. Pay particular attention to how many sentences begin with the word “I.” A number of you began about 75% of your sentence with it. One easy remedy is to just cut sometimes. However, in some instance it will make more sense to use some kind of opening phrase to delay it. Regardless, you need to read through as part of your proofreading and revising methodology to check your variety and frequency of beginning with “I.”
Lastly, as part of the revision of these introductions, I am going to impose a page and a half limit. Most of you wrote far more than that, which was great. Nevertheless, there was a lot of extraneous material and an occasional ramble. By going back over what you have developed, in combination with the thinking yet to come from the note taking and engagement with your sources, you should be able to trim the introduction and tighten it, sharpening your story and focus, and building to a single, refined guiding question.
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