A Guide to Report Writing

The Introduction

The role of the introduction is to outline the question that you are asking within the report. It also should provide the background to the question and a justification for asking the question. Outlined below are a few guidelines that show how to go about attempting this section.

One basic guideline for the structure of the introduction is that it should start with an outline of the general area of the study; in the example introduced in the last section this would be strategies for improving memory. There should be a review of the relevant work in the area; you should attempt to outline the main theories and describe the experimental work in the area. It is not necessary that you cover the whole area in detail but you should cover the work that is directly related to your study and hypothesis. You must be careful to reference the sources of your information within the text. This is done in a similar manner to that done within essays (see the citing sources section in the essay writing guide).

The next task for the introduction is to provide a coherent argument for your hypothesis. It is important that you provide justification for performing the experiment within this section. This is not done independently of the literature review described above. When you are outlining the research and theory you should also be making clear the rationale behind your experiment. If we were writing an introduction to the example experiment we would outline the research concerning memory strategies but also perhaps point out, towards the end, that there had been no systematic comparison between different types of mnemonics, this being the rationale behind the experiment. This should all lead logically to the final element in your introduction which is the hypothesis. This is dealt with on the next page.