Note particularly the language used in the first two sentences to express Move la.
The increasing interest in ... has heightened the need for ....
Of particular interest and complexity are ....
Recently, there has been growing interest in ....
The development of ... has led to the hope that....
The .., has become a favourite topic for analysis ....
The study of ... has become an important aspect of ....
A central issue in ... is ....
The ... has been extensively studied in recent years.
Many recent studies have focused on ....
Move 2: Establishing a niche
In many ways, Move 2 is the key move in Introductions. It connects Move 1 (what has been done) to Move 3 (what the present research will do). Move 2 thus establishes the reason for the study. By the end of Move 2, the reader should have a good idea of what is going to come in Move 3.
Move 2s establish a niche by indicating a gap. Probably the most common way to indicate a gap is to use a “negative” subject. Presumably, negative subjects are chosen because they signal immediately to the reader that Move 1 has come to an end. Note the following uses of little and few:
However, little information/attention/work/data/research ....
However, few studies/investigations/researchers/attempts ....
Of course, not all RP Introductions express Move 2 by indicating an obvious gap. You may prefer, for various reasons, to avoid negative comment altogether. In such cases, a useful alternative is to use a contrastive statement.
The research has tended to focus on ...,rather than on ....
These studies have emphasised ...,as opposed to ....
Although considerable research has been devoted to ... , rather less attention has been paid to ....
The previous research ... has concentrated on ....
Most studies have been content to ....
So far, investigations have been confined to ...
Move 3: Occupying the Niche
The third and final step is to show you want to fill the gap (or answer the question) that has been created in Move 2.
The purpose of this paper is to ...
The purpose of this investigation is to ...
The aim of this paper is to ...
This paper reports on the results obtained ....
This study was designed to ...
In this paper, we give results of ...
In this paper, we argue that ....
This paper argues that ....
We have organise the rest of this paper in the following way ....
This paper is structured as follows ....
The remainder of this paper is divided into five sections ....
Example
Identify the moves in the following introductions:
THE THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY AND SPECIFIC HEAT OF EPOXY RESIN FROM 0.1 TO 8.0K.
The thermal properties of glassy materials at low temperatures are still not completely understood. The thermal conductivity has a plateau which is usually in the range 5 to 10K and below this temperature it has a temperature dependence which varies approximately as T. The specific heat below 4K is much larger than that which would be expected from the Debye theory and it often has an additional term which is proportional to T. Some progress has been made towards understanding the thermal behaviour by assuming that there is a cut-off in the photon spectrum at high frequencies (Zaitlin and Anderson, 1975a, b) and that there is an additional system of low-lying two-level states (Anderson et al., 1972; Phillips, 1972). Nevertheless more experimental data are required and in particular it would seem desirable to make experiments on glassy samples whose properties can be varied slightly from one to the other. The present investigation reports attempts to do this by using various samples of the same epoxy resin which have been subjected to different curing cycles. Measurements of the specific heat (or the diffusing) and the thermal conductivity have been taken in the temperature range 0.1 to 80K for a set of specimens which covered up to nine different curing cycles.
(Kelham and Rosenburg, 1981)
