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This is the 50th episode of Just Writing, and I guess it’s time to introduce ourselves. Well, to talk about ‘introductions’ in academic writing. How to set out your stall, how to get people excited or at least emotionally-engaged in your writing. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.

An introduction to a piece of academic writing will vary from a paragraph or two in an article, to a whole chapter in a book. But we usually start with who we are and why we are here. The ‘who?’ might include personal details: it has become more popular to describe the author’s identity, in order to clarify what biases or advantages they may have, but the personal details may simply refer to previous research on the theme. And the ‘why?’ may include why the research came about, what the intentions of the author are, and so on. Most introductions are written after the rest of the article, chapter or book, but some writers see the introduction as their motivation for the rest of the task, and in that case it may be written first.

What do we include in the introduction? A guide to the writing to come, and at least a hint at the writing’s conclusion and hoped-for significance – what comes next. What do we leave out? We should avoid over-claiming, or writing condescendingly about other authors or our readers.

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We want to talk about writing in other languages. The majority of journal articles in the journals we’re involved with, and two of the books we’ve edited, have had the majority of chapters written by authors for whom English is an additional language. Julian’s own father was German, who wrote his doctorate in his fourth language (French) and then worked and published in his fifth language, English. Some of the greatest writers in English have been writing in an additional language: Joseph Conrad, who was Polish and born in Ukraine, is an excellent example. So we don’t get all high and mighty when it comes to writers in languages other than their mother tongues.

In a previous podcast, we talked about how ‘academic’ is itself an additional language, so all writers, whatever their home language is, will have to learn to write ‘academic’. AI does a good job of converting text (from any language, including non-academic English) into ‘academic English’, but it is a very bland style. We prefer the character in writing by real people, with the distinctive features of their own culture, including their other languages. As readers, that is, we are interested in the core of the work, and the surface features just give it more character and more authenticity. We have to remember this, when marking student work or reviewing professional academic work. There is honey at the core.

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