HOW TO WRITE A

PROJECT
HOW TO WRITE THE INTRODUCTION
PART OF A PROJECT
OVERVIEW
 Understand the purpose and function of the intro chapter
 Craft an enticing and engaging opening section
 Provide a background and context to the study
 Clearly define the research problem
 State your research aims, objectives and questions
 Explain the significance of your study
 Identify the limitations of your research
 Outline the structure of your dissertation or thesis
HOW TO WRITE THE INTRODUCTION PART OF A PROJECT

UNDERSTAND THE PURPOSE AND FUNCTION

OF THE INTRODUCTION CHAPTER

To craft a high-quality dissertation or thesis introduction

chapter, you need to understand exactly what this chapter
needs to achieve. In other words, what’s its purpose? As the
name suggests, the introduction chapter needs to introduce
the reader to your research so that they understand what
you’re trying to figure out, or what problem you’re trying to
solve. More specifically, you need to answer four important
questions in your introduction chapter.
HOW TO WRITE THE INTRODUCTION PART OF A PROJECT

These questions are:

 What will you be researching? (in other words, your research topic)
 Why is that worthwhile? (in other words, your justification)
 What will the scope of your research be? (in other words, what will you
cover and what won’t you cover)
 What will the limitations of your research be? (in other words, what will
the potential shortcomings of your research be?)
In other words, this chapter has to explain the
“what” and the “why” of your research – what’s it all about and why’s that
important.
 HOW TO WRITE THE INTRODUCTION PART OF A PROJECT

The 7 Essential Ingredients

 The opening section – where you’ll introduce the reader to your research in
high-level terms
 The background to the study – where you’ll explain the context of your project
 The research problem – where you’ll explain the “gap” that exists in the current
research
 The research aims, objectives and questions – where you’ll clearly state what
your research will aim to achieve
 The significance (or justification) – where you’ll explain why your research is
worth doing and the value it will provide to the world
 The limitations – where you’ll acknowledge the potential limitations of your
project and approach
 The structure – where you’ll briefly outline the structure of your dissertation or
thesis to help orient the reader
HOW TO WRITE THE INTRODUCTION PART OF A PROJECT

CRAFT AN ENTICING AND

ENGAGING OPENING SECTION
The very first essential ingredient for your dissertation introduction
is, well, an introduction or opening section. Just like every other
chapter, your introduction chapter needs to start by providing a brief
overview of what you’ll be covering in the chapter.
This section needs to engage the reader with clear, concise
language that can be easily understood and digested. If the reader
(your marker!) has to struggle through it, they’ll lose interest, which
will make it harder for you to earn marks. Just because you’re writing
an academic paper doesn’t mean you can ignore the basic principles
of engaging writing used by marketers, bloggers, and journalists. At
the end of the day, you’re all trying to sell an idea – yours is just a
research idea.
 HOW TO WRITE THE INTRODUCTION PART OF A PROJECT

PROVIDE A BACKGROUND AND

CONTEXT TO THE STUDY
The foundation of your research topic is the background to your
study. This section of your introduction chapter should provide a
broad overview of the topic area that you’ll be researching, as well
as the current contextual factors. This could include, for example, a
brief history of the topic, recent developments in the area, key pieces
of research in the area and so on. In other words, in this section, you
need to provide the relevant background information to give the
reader a decent foundational understanding of your research area.
HOW TO WRITE THE INTRODUCTION PART OF A PROJECT

CLEARLY DEFINE THE RESEARCH

PROBLEM
While the background section would have eluded to a potential research problem (or even multiple
research problems), the purpose of this section is to narrow the focus and highlight the specific research
problem you’ll focus on. A research problem can be any issue or question for there isn’t already a well-
established and agreed-upon answer in the existing research. In other words, a research problem exists
when there’s a need to answer a question (or set of questions), but there’s a gap in the existing literature
, or the existing research is conflicting and/or inconsistent.
So, to present your research problem, you need to make it clear what exactly is missing in the current
literature and why this is a problem. It’s usually a good idea to structure this discussion into three
sections – specifically:
 What’s already well-established in the literature (in other words, the current state of research)
 What’s missing in the literature (in other words, the literature gap)
 Why this is a problem (in other words, why it’s important to fill this gap)
HOW TO WRITE THE INTRODUCTION PART OF A PROJECT

STATE YOUR RESEARCH AIMS,

OBJECTIVES AND QUESTIONS
Research Aim: The starting point is to clearly state your research aim (or aims). The
research aim is the main goal or the overarching purpose of your dissertation or thesis. In
other words, it’s a high-level statement of what you’re aiming to achieve.

Research Objectives: While the research aims cover the high-level “what”, the research
objectives are a bit more practically oriented, looking at specific things you’ll be doing to
achieve those research aims. Research objectives describe the actions you’ll take and the
specific things you’ll investigate in order to achieve your research aims. They break down
the research aims into more specific, actionable objectives.
Research Questions: research questions bring the aims and objectives another level
“down to earth”. These are the specific questions that your project or theses will seek to
answer. The research questions typically relate directly to the research objectives and
sometimes can look a bit obvious, but they are still extremely important.
 HOW TO WRITE THE INTRODUCTION PART OF A PROJECT

EXPLAIN THE SIGNIFICANCE OF YOUR STUDY

Significance of the study state how your study

will benefit either industry, academia, or –
ideally – both. In other words, you need to
explain how your research will make a
difference and what implications it will have.
 HOW TO WRITE THE INTRODUCTION PART OF A PROJECT

IDENTIFY THE LIMITATIONS OF YOUR RESEARCH

Limitations of research includes low or zero budget, tight time constraints and limited researcher
experience.
 Generally, you’ll want to consider at least the following four common limitations. These are:
 Your scope – for example, perhaps your focus is very narrow and doesn’t consider how
certain variables interact with each other.
 Your research methodology – for example, a qualitative methodology could be criticised for being
overly subjective, or a quantitative methodology could be criticised for oversimplifying the situation.
 Your resources – for example, a lack of time, money, equipment and your own research experience.
 The generalisability of your findings – for example, the findings from the study of a specific
industry or country.
 HOW TO WRITE THE MATERIALS
AND METHODS PART OF A

PROJECT
Begin writing the Materials and Methods while you are performing your experiments.
Writing during the research process will prevent you from forgetting important details and
save you time when you begin writing the full manuscript. You can also ask co-authors who
performed specific experiments to write the corresponding parts of the Methods section.
 Start with general information that applies to the entire manuscript and then move on to
specific experimental details. Examples of general information that you could begin with
are characteristics of the study population, sources and genotypes of bacterial strains, or
descriptions of samples or sample sites. Then, you could share more details about your
experiment.
 Match the order in which methods are described to the order of the results that were
generated using those methods. Also, be sure that each method you used is described,
even if it is just a quick sentence (e.g., “Toxin assays were performed as described
[reference]”). This practice is helpful for transparency, as well as reproducibility.
 HOW TO WRITE THE MATERIALS
AND METHODS PART OF A
PROJECT
 Always include citations for procedures that have beendescribed
previously. If you made any modifications, be sure to list them.
 Describe statistical tests as fully as possible. Give as much
information about the tests as possible; just mentioning a t-test is
not sufficient for the reader to determine if the correct statistical
analysis was performed.
 Avoid discussing the pros and cons of certain methods or resultsof
any kind. Save evaluations for different methods for the Discussion
section of your paper.
 HOW TO WRITE THE MATERIALS
AND METHODS PART OF A
PROJECT
To save space, be concise, yet thorough, when listing the equipment you used. You
might consider listing all of your equipment purchased from a single company in one
sentence. Or, you could create a flowchart figure of the steps in an important
procedure. Before you finish your manuscript, ask yourself the following questions
about your Materials and Methods section to ensure that you have included all
important information.
 Is there sufficient detail so that the experiments can be reproduced?
 Is there excess information that could be removed without affecting the
interpretation of the results?
 Are all the appropriate controls mentioned?
 Are all appropriate citations included?
 Is the source of each reagent listed?
 HOW TO WRITE THE DISCUSSION
PART OF A PROJECT
The discussion section is where you delve into the meaning, importance, and relevance of
your results. It should focus on explaining and evaluating what you found, showing how it
relates to your literature review and paper or dissertation topic, and making an argument in
support of your overall conclusion. It should not be a second results section. There are
different ways to write this section, but you can focus your writing around these key
elements:
1. Summary: A brief recap of your key results.
2. Interpretations: what do your results mean?
3. Implications: why do your results matter?
4. Limitation: what can’t your results tell us?
5. Recommendations: Avenues for further studies or analyses.
 SUMMARIZE YOUR KEY FINDINGS

Start this section by reiterating your research problem and

concisely summarizing your major findings. To speed up the
process you can use a summarizer to quickly get an overview of
all important findings. Don’t just repeat all the data you have
already reported—aim for a clear statement of the overall result
that directly answers your main research question. This should be
no more than one paragraph.
 GIVE YOUR INTERPRETATIONS

The meaning of your results may seem obvious to you, but it’s important to spell out their
significance for your reader, showing exactly how they answer your research question. The
form of your interpretations will depend on the type of research, but some typical approaches
to interpreting the data include:
1. Identifying correlations, patterns and relationships among the data;
2. Discussing whether the results met your expectations or supported your hypotheses;
3. Contextualizing your findings within previous research and theory;
4. Explaining unexpected results and evaluating their significance;
5. Considering possible alternative explanation and making arguments for your position.
You can organize your discussion around key themes, hypotheses, or research questions,
following the same structure as your results section. Alternatively, you can also begin by
highlighting the most significant or unexpected results.
 DISCUSS RESULTS LIMITATIONS

Even the best research has its limitations.

Acknowledging these is important to demonstrate your
credibility. Limitations aren’t about listing your errors,
but about providing an accurate picture of what can
and cannot be concluded from your study. Limitations
might be due to your overall research design, specific
methodological choices, or unanticipated obstacles that
emerged during your research process.
 MAKE RECOMMENDATIONS

Based on the discussion of your results, you can make

recommendations for practical implementation or further
research. Sometimes, the recommendations are saved for
the conclusion. Suggestions for further research can lead
directly from the limitations. Don’t just state that more
studies should be done—give concrete ideas for how future
work can build on areas that your own research was unable
to address.
REFERENCE

 How to Write a Dissertation Introduction Chapter By:

Derek Jansen (MBA). Reviewed by Dr Eunice
Rautenbach (D. Tech) March 2020
 Materials and Methods: 7 Writing Tips by Ben Mudrak,
PhD. Published by AJE, Part of Springer Nature. 2011
 How to Write a Discussion Section |Tips and Examples
by Shona McCombes. Published on Scribbr in 2022.