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How to write at the beginning of an English paper
How to write at the beginning of an English paper

As we all know, everything is difficult at the beginning of an English paper, and so is writing a paper. Writing a good beginning means that you can write it down smoothly. For many people, writing an English paper is more difficult than writing a Chinese paper. Now I'll give you a brief understanding of how to write an English paper at the beginning.

How to write 1 at the beginning of an English paper?

The first paragraph or so of an article is usually the most important part of the whole article to get "just right" This is not only an opportunity to catch the reader's attention, but also an opportunity to set the rest of the agenda, tone and content of the article. Strictly speaking, there is no single "right" way to start an article. Just because it may have written articles on countless topics, it is also possible to launch articles in many aspects. However, most good beginnings have some common qualities with prose. If this is taken into account, the preface of the article can be greatly improved, otherwise it will be lacking. Please refer to the following steps 1 to get started!

Lay a road map for your article.

1, starting with a striking sentence. When your article may (or, admittedly, may not) interest you as an author, it may not necessarily interest readers. Generally speaking, readers are a little picky about what they read and what they do. If a work doesn't attract their attention immediately in the first paragraph, it is very likely that they won't be too lazy to look at the rest. Because of this, it is usually a good idea to order the reader to pay attention to a sentence from the beginning. As long as the first sentence is logically related to the rest of the article, it is not shameful to be a conspicuous person.

You may want to start with a fascinating, little-known fact and statistics to catch the reader's attention. For example, if you write an article about a world where the risk of childhood obesity is increasing, you can start by saying: "Contrary to the popular view that childhood obesity is only a problem of wealthy and pampered westerners, the World Health Organization reported that in 20 12, more than 30% of preschool children in developing countries were overweight or obese." On the other hand, if your article is more logical, you may want to start. You can start an article about the summer vacation like this: "When I feel the sunshine in Costa Rica through the canopy of the jungle and hear the voice of roaring monkeys in the distance, I know I have found a very special place."

2. Let your readers enter the "meat" of your article. A great first sentence can attract the reader's attention, but if you don't involve the reader in your article, she will easily lose interest. According to your first sentence, pay attention to the logical connection of one or two sentences and take the rest of the first sentence as a whole. Usually, these sentences will be expanded in the narrow scope of the first sentence, putting the specific snapshot in some larger context.

For example, in your obesity article, you may follow the following first sentence: "In fact, childhood obesity is an increasingly serious problem, which is increasingly affecting rich and poor countries." This explains the urgency of the problem described in the first sentence and gives a broader content.

For your holiday article, the first sentence you may say is: "I'm deep in the jungle of Tortu Gallo National Park, and I lost more ways to thank one", which tells readers where the image in the first sentence comes from, and leads readers to the rest of the article, laughing at the fact that the narrative it will eventually reveal is "lost".

3. Tell the reader what your article is. Many times, articles are not pure descriptions-they don't exist. In fact, they tell you exactly what is basic. Usually, they have a specific purpose. This can be almost anything. This article may be aimed at changing readers' thoughts on a subject, persuading readers to take action, doing something that is not well understood, or simply telling a thought-provoking story. In any case, the basic purpose of the first paragraph is to tell the reader what the purpose of the article is. In this way, readers can quickly choose whether to continue with the rest of the article.

In your obesity article, you may sum up: "The purpose of this article is to analyze the current trend of the global child objectivity rate and recommend specific policy measures to solve this growth problem", which clearly illustrates the purpose of the article. There is no chaos here.

For your holiday article, you can try something like this: "This is the story of my summer in Costa Rica. One summer was bitten by another spider, and the Nocardia norvegicus and Giardia norvegicus couldn't change their lives." This tells readers that they will make fun of the specific details in the article by reading a person's trip to a foreign account.

4. Or, a summary of the structure of your article. Sometimes, describing the plan of your article to achieve its purpose is an appropriate step-by-step introduction. If your article can be easily broken down into different and specific parts, it will be useful and make the theme easier for readers to grasp. If you are a student, it is also useful for you to know how to do it, because some teachers will ask you to do so. However, it is not always a good idea to summarize different articles in the introduction. In some cases, especially for light articles, reading may be a bit mechanical, and presenting too much information will threaten readers.

You may continue to say, "This article deals with three global health problems: the supply of high-calorie food, the reduction of physical exercise and the increasingly popular sedentary leisure activities." For a simple research paper, it is a good idea to discuss the main topic, because it can make readers understand the reason of the article immediately and explain the purpose of the previous sentence.

On the other hand, for your holiday article, you may not summarize your article like this. Now that you have established that your article is relaxed and playful, it sounds a bit strange to continue. For example, "I feel a different person during my journey by experiencing the city life capital of San Jose and the rural life in the Gallo jungle of Tortu", which is not a terrible sentence, but it did not flow from the people in front, because it laid a strict rigid structure and was unnecessary.

5. If necessary, attach a paper. In thesis writing, a sentence is a sentence, that is, a simple sentence. Describe the "main points" of the article as clearly and concisely as possible. Some articles, especially five papers as part of academic assignments or standardized tests, require you to take the statement part of the paper as part of the opening. Even if you don't need this article, you can benefit from the concise purpose of a bold proposition statement. Generally speaking, the thesis statement is included at or near the end of the first paragraph, although there is no hard and fast rule. Specifically, the thesis statement must be.

For your obesity article, because you are dealing with a serious topic and writing in a clinical and simple way, you may directly declare in your paper: "By analyzing the existing survey data, this paper aims to find out specific policy measures, such as the possible path of global obesity reduction." This article tells readers the exact purpose of this article in relatively few words.

You can't put a holiday article and a written statement together. Because you are more interested in setting a mood, telling a story and explaining your personal theme, a direct and objective statement, such as "This article will describe my summer vacation in Costa Rica", will sound strangely reluctant and unnecessary.

6. Set a suitable tone for your article. Discuss what you will talk about except your space. Your first paragraph is also a space to decide how you will talk about it. What is your voice that encourages (or hinders) your readers to read your article? If the tone at the beginning of your article is clear, pleasant and suitable for the theme, then your readers will be easier to read if they are confused, and there will be great changes in sentences or topics that are not at hand.

Look at the sentences above. Note that although the voices of obesity composition and holiday composition are quite different, they are both clearly written and suitable for the theme. Obesity composition is a serious analytical text and an article dealing with public health problems, so it is reasonable to have some clinical and viewpoint on these sentences. On the other hand, this article is about an interesting and exciting experience, which has a great influence on the author, so it is a reasonable sentence and an interesting little game, which contains exciting details and conveys the author's sense of miracle.

7. Cut to the chase! One of the most important rules introduced is that the shorter the better. If you can convey all the information to you, you need five sentences instead of six. If you can use a simple, everyday word and a more humble word (such as "start" and "launch"), do it. If you can convey your message in ten words instead of twelve, then do it. Anywhere, you can shorten your introduction channels without sacrificing quality and clarity. Remember, your article begins with getting the reader into the body of the article, but its hiss is not the body of the article itself, so keep it short.

As mentioned above, although you should be as concise as possible, you should not shorten your introduction so much that it becomes unclear or unreasonable. For example, in your obesity article, you should not shorten this sentence: "In fact, childhood obesity is a global problem, which increasingly affects rich and poor countries". ..... This sentence: "Actually, obesity is a big problem" does not tell the whole story. This article is about the rising incidence of childhood obesity around the world, not that obesity is bad for you.

How to write at the beginning of an English paper? We randomly selected 50 journal articles from the sub-database of aerospace discipline in academic corpus, extracted the first sentence of the article and made a simple text analysis.

Through observation, we found that the samples can be basically divided into four categories according to their expressive functions, namely, advocating the central position, commenting on previous studies, summarizing research topics, and proposing existing problems (Swales 1990).

1, occupying the central position, 20 cases (40%)

This kind of examples mainly emphasize the central position of the research topic in the research field, or its importance, advantages or necessity, and point out that the research to be reported is meaningful, important or has been considered as the main topic in the research field. The main examples are:

[1] structural damage detection and health monitoring are very important in many applications.

[2] In the low power environment, combustion noise has a great influence on the noise of the whole turbofan engine, which is a typical feature of approach flight.

[3] In the past twenty years, the study of flow control has been one of the main topics in fluid mechanics.

[4] Visualization of surface flow is helpful to understand the flow in many applications, and can be used to supplement and verify the computational research of complex flow.

Available sequences are "XXX is important", "XXX plays an important role in …", "XXX is of interest to particles", and so on.

2. Reviewing the previous similar studies, 15 cases (30%).

Most of these examples are a review of the research or research progress in a certain research topic or field for many years. For example:

[5] In the past decades, a lot of research work has been devoted to understanding the physical mechanism behind the typical symptoms of nonlinear axial combustion instability in solid propellant rocket motors (SRMs), or at least the surrounding factors.

[6] From the early 1 800s (1), when Brande noticed the influence on the heat and mass transfer of the diffusion flame between electrodes, he had studied the influence of applying an electric field on the flame, which was subsequently verified by Lewis (2) in 193 1.

In addition, most examples of this kind use the present perfect tense. For reference, the phrase sequence XXX has been/has been studied, and previous/recent studies show that it has been/has been shown by shawn et al.

3. Summarize the research topic, 14 cases (28%).

In the collected samples, "summarizing research topics" mainly refers to summarizing or stating the characteristics or objective facts of a research field/topic. In this kind of example sentences, most of the authors organize sentences according to specific research topics, so there are no typical sentence patterns.

[7] Many technically interesting flows occur at high Reynolds numbers and are usually characterized as:

[8] The Hill-Klosi-Wiltshire (HCW) equation describes the relative motion of the pursuer relative to the target when both cars are running around a central gravitational source.

4. Put forward the problems existing in the current research, with 1 case (2%).

There is only one example in the first sentence of the article to point out a technical problem, see [9]:

[9] The air propagation of directional energy will suffer the consequences including the reduction of range, accuracy and overall effectiveness, because the directional energy interacts with the changing refractive index in the propagating fluid medium (1–3).

To sum up briefly, among the 50 articles we collected, 40% emphasized the importance, advantages or explanations of the research topic/field in the first sentence, which became the research focus; The first sentence of 30% articles aims to review or comment on previous similar studies; 28% of the articles objectively summarized or stated the characteristics of the research topic in the first sentence; Only 2%, or 1 article, pointed out a technical problem in the first sentence.

This data also shows that we can flexibly organize the sentence pattern and content of the first sentence of the article in various forms according to our own research topics. In view of the limited number of samples, the above contents are for reference only. We also suggest that friends pay attention to accumulation and summary in the process of reading literature, take a look at the periodical articles in their own professional fields, and write the first sentence in what form. So you can imitate it when you write your own paper. After all, a good beginning is half the battle.