An introduction has one job: to make a reader want to continue, and to tell them exactly what you will argue. It does this by narrowing — broad context first, your specific claim last.
Enter your topic and this tool lays out the six moves in order, with the reasoning behind each and the standard openings that mark an essay as unedited.
Start wide enough that a reader outside your exact subject can follow, then narrow steadily to your claim. Each sentence should be more specific than the one before it, so by the time the thesis arrives it feels inevitable rather than abrupt.
The commonest structural failure is starting too wide. An essay on one policy does not need to begin with the history of civilisation, and a reader recognises the padding immediately.
The dictionary opening — "According to the Oxford Dictionary, X is defined as…" — tells a reader you had no better idea. The cosmic opening — "Since the beginning of time, humans have…" — says nothing and could preface any essay ever written.
So does announcing your own essay: "In this essay I will discuss…" is not an argument, it is a table of contents. Where a roadmap is genuinely useful, it belongs at the end of the introduction, after the thesis, not in place of it.
Everything before the thesis exists to set it up. It should be a single sentence, specific, and arguable — if nobody could reasonably disagree, it is a fact rather than a thesis, and there is nothing to argue for over the following pages.
A useful test: could a competent reader predict your essay's structure from the thesis alone? If so, it is doing its job. If the thesis could sit on top of five different essays, it is too vague.
Introductions are hard to write first because you do not yet know what you are introducing. Drafting one to orient yourself is fine, but treat it as scaffolding and expect to replace it.
When the essay is finished, come back and check the introduction against what you actually argued. Essays drift while being written, and an introduction that promises something the body never delivers is one of the most visible weaknesses a marker encounters.
Roughly 10% of the essay. For a 2,000-word essay, about 200 words — one solid paragraph.
Draft it if it helps you start, but rewrite it last. The essay you finish is rarely the one you planned.
At the end of the introduction, after the context and the problem have been set up.
A brief roadmap after the thesis can help in longer essays. It is no substitute for the thesis, and under about 1,500 words it is usually unnecessary.
Yes, if it is genuinely apt and you engage with it immediately. A decorative quotation that the essay never returns to is wasted words.