How to write the introduction of a college paper: Academic writing tutorial

hello there welcome to the smart student my name is chelsea siebern welcome to my channel i'm here to give you the online college student the best tips tricks and tools to help you through your online program for today the topic of this video is going to be how to write an introduction for your apa college paper now i know from personal experience and from all the conversations that i've had with students that writing the introduction to your paper is not only challenging tough but it's one of the most time consuming time blocking tasks when it comes to writing good college papers so that's what i'm going to discuss with you today is how to write that introduction in the most painless pain-free quickest way possible so you can save your energy for the part that actually matters which is writing your actual papers now before we dive in i do have to make two quick disclaimers number one being that this is a framework for writing apa formatted papers so if your assignment is a creative writing or maybe a personal essay this might not be the best framework for you but for everybody else i find this tends to work very well disclaimer number two if you're your professor says anything that deviates from what i'm going to say in this video please follow their instructions first and foremost as always they're the one that's grading you not me so be mindful of that all right guys before i walk you through an actual real life example of how to write the introduction to your paper let's talk about the mindset when it comes to writing an introduction first so for all of you that are watching raise your hand if you would agree that writing the introduction is intimidating this is where your mind decides to go blank why because starting is the hardest part am i right well i'm going to let you guys in on a little secret right now the introduction is not the start of your paper it is simply a summary of what your paper is about the actual start of your assignment is the first point you talk about in the actual body of your assignment in general i like to think of your introduction in very simplistic terms serving two purposes number one the purpose of your introduction is to briefly introduce the topic of your paper either what you're gonna argue or what you're gonna talk about you are just introducing the topic here number two the order also known as the flow of your introduction think of it like the road map to your paper in other words you're going to write this in the same order that your paper is written also known as the outline of your paper so this is how i like to think about it when it comes to writing fast high scoring efficient college papers three things need to match up your assignment your outline and your introduction so number one you receive your writing assignment number two you create an outline in the same order of objectives that the assignment is assigned to you number three your introduction is written in the same order as your outline if you structure your papers like this not only does it make it very easy for you to go in and plug in the correct information it makes sure you don't deviate off topic that you don't include information that doesn't need to be included it saves you from your mind going blank and lastly this makes it really easy for your professor to grade why you're going to hear me say this a lot in all my videos about college paper writing but remember this your professor is grading you off your assignment their grading rubric mirrors that assignment if they're not just using that assignment to grade your paper so if you can align your outline in your introduction to your assignment that's half the battle right there maybe not half but you get my drift all right now that our mindset is straightened out let's go ahead and move on to the portion where i show you a real life example for the sake of time and not confusing you guys i chose a shorter writing example i think this would have been five pages when it's finished if you want to see how i write the introduction to one of my larger assignments like a term paper be sure to check out the video how to outline your college papers i'll link it in the description below but let's go ahead and jump into the computer all right go ahead and pull up whatever you're going to be writing your paper in i'm going to use microsoft word common theme you'll notice with me also is that i like to split my screen go ahead and pull up your assignment on one side your word document or your google docs on the other and let's go ahead and get started so first things first go ahead and set up your paper under apa formatting standards i do have a video if you're not familiar with how to do that i'm going to link that in the description below for the sake of time i'm going to go ahead and speed up and do it here for you all right now that your paper is in apa standards and ready to go the next step is to write your outline now i know for those that are saying isn't this a video on writing the introduction it is but it's relevant so i'm going to go through it real quick all right so here's your writing assignment but like i stated in the beginning of this video three things need to match it needs to be your assignment to your outline so you can write your introduction now what do i mean by match typically you want to outline your paper in the order that it's assigned to you so using this assignment is an example i would outline my paper like this so if i were to briefly scan through this assignment i would see that my what meaning what i'm going to write about is indicated in these couple of sentences to start so my what is i'm working for a company that is about to introduce a cellular phone into the market to compete with the apple iphone 7. i have been tasked with setting the price okay great this is the what of my paper i'm going to be working for a company that's introducing a new phone that competes with the apple i5 into the market my job is to set the price great simple enough now i'm going to look back into the assignment to find my how the how is usually the different objectives that are asked of you in your assignment this is what you're going to set your section headings based off of or your outline as we can see here it's going to be a four to five page paper where i'm going to discuss the following price goals how i estimate demand cost profits and choose a price policy to help determine a base price great i'm also going to discuss these three pricing strategies one two three lastly i'm going to conclude with how to use discounts geographic pricing and other special pricing tactics now what i just read to you are the objectives of this paper i'm going to use those and make my outline if you feel lost or this seems like a lot don't worry follow along with me it's all going to make sense in a second when i show you how to write the introduction [Music] okay all right my outline is set up and if you notice it follows the same flow as the assignment now real quick if you're wondering why some of the section headings are centered and some are left face it's because the ones in the center are your main sections the ones on the left are the subsections that are relevant to the centered one that it's under in other words that's the main those are the subsections underneath it those are the standards for outlining with section headings under apa 7th edition alright guys the moment you've been waiting for it let's go ahead and write the introduction all right so coming to my paper first things first let's go left centered one tab and let's start typing when you're writing your introduction remember two things just as i stated at the beginning this video the purpose of your introduction is one to say what your paper is about into two to do it in a road map formation so starting with introducing my paper i would ask myself what am i writing about and my what is described in these first couple of sentences in my assignment so the way i would start is the purpose of this paper is to set the price for the new phone that my company will be introducing into the market that is competitive with the apple iphone 5. it will focus on setting the price in regard to pricing goals how to estimate demand cost and profits and a chosen price policy to help determine a base price if you've noticed i've moved on from what the paper is about now i'm going into the road map formation laying out what the reader is to expect in the order that i have it written from here i will continue to add these last two sections in my introduction so adding in the second section i would say something like furthermore this paper will provide a plan for the following three pricing strategies price skimming penetration pricing and status quo pricing to add in the final section an easy way to do this is to say something like to conclude other special pricing tactics such as how to use discounting in geographic pricing will be discussed so as you can see writing my introduction was very simple i actually had to put no thought into it since i had my outline already written now there are other transition words you can use between the sentences but in general this is a good format you simply state what you're talking about and then how you're going to be discussing this topic whether you're arguing something or you're just writing a research paper also as you can see now my paper is set up in a very easy format for me to just go in and plug in the information i found that when i started writing my apa college papers in very black and white terms meaning i took away the clutter of stressing about making it good making it tell a story making sure everything flowed a certain way and i had all these questions about what to add and i simply just started adding what was in the assignment i started scoring very high my paper writing was very fast because this method is very efficient if i go in and plug in the correct information under all of these sections it makes it very easy for the professor to grade and it makes it very hard for them to count you off on anything because you've included it all so here's my final thought for you ironically i started writing good papers when i stopped trying to write good papers and i simply just started writing what was in my assignments i started writing for the professors from the perspective of how they were going to be grading it and what they were going to be looking for anyways i hope you've enjoyed this video i've had quite a few new subscribers recently so feel free to introduce yourself in the comment section below and as always every video is a standing open invitation for you to write down any questions you might have that you would like to see in a future video from me anyways guys have a great day happy paper writing to you bye

Channel: Smart Student

Views: 121,156

Keywords: write the introduction to your college paper, How to write the introduction of a research paper, How to write the introduction to an essay, how to write an introduction paragraph, how to write an introduction paragraph with thesis statement, introduction of a research paper, abstract and introduction of a research paper, academic writing tutorial, academic writing tutorial for beginners, academic writing tips, how to write a research paper fast, College essay, Research paper

Id: KorGqNfh0tM

Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020