| The Introduction usually starts with a broader introduction of the thesis topic. The purpose of the first paragraphs is to put your thesis topic in greater context, explaining why the task is important, presenting a motivation for your thesis. From the top of my head, an example of introduction about opinion mining: ''"Every day, people freely express their opinions on social media. Understanding these opinions is important, but increasingly more difficult as there is more and more data. Opinion mining is a field of natural language processing (NLP), which ... (description of the task)..."''. Generally, you are striving for a ''"greater-good-for-humanity"'' motivation, or ''"interesting-scientific-question"'' motivation, as opposed to ''"my-supervisor-suggested-the-topic"'' or ''"it-seemed-easy-enough"''. Beware of too personal a motivation, such as ''"I have been doing this topic for years, so it seemed logical to continue in it."'' or ''"I do this for a living, so I might as well make a thesis out of it."''. | The Introduction usually starts with a broader introduction of the thesis topic. The purpose of the first paragraphs is to put your thesis topic in greater context, explaining why the task is important, presenting a motivation for your thesis. From the top of my head, an example of introduction about opinion mining: ''"Every day, people freely express their opinions on social media. Understanding these opinions is important, but increasingly more difficult as there is more and more data. Opinion mining is a field of natural language processing (NLP), which ... (description of the task)..."''. Generally, you are striving for a ''"greater-good-for-humanity"'' motivation, or ''"interesting-scientific-question"'' motivation, as opposed to ''"my-supervisor-suggested-the-topic"'' or ''"it-seemed-easy-enough"''. Beware of too personal a motivation, such as ''"I have been doing this topic for years, so it seemed logical to continue in it."'' or ''"I do this for a living, so I might as well make a thesis out of it."''. |
| | By the way, a stylistic advice to make things both simple and complicated: Many papers start with words like ''"Recently,"'' or ''"These days,"'', ''"Currently"'' or some such expression. It is very widespread and safe way to start an essay. It certainly gives a sense of generalization (which may be a good or a bad thing). Some consider it a little cliché, not terribly creative and even bad writing style. Some have no opinion on the subject (just checked with my colleague.). In my opinion, it is a safe way to start if you are at a loss (the first word is always the most difficult) but it is not the most impressive way to open the Introduction. |
