In essence, I go through my transition formula to get students to learn how to narrow their focus as they get closer to the thesis point in the introduction. If I have a student who is working inductively, I usually explain that it is the end of the paragraph, perhaps when they are answering the WHY portion of the thesis, where they can generalize more around the meaning of the paper. For other students who have problems with the fairytale analogy, I often ask them to consider the future implications of their topic. This is a tough one for me, as we aren t realy into intros and conclusions in my field. I also tend to use the intro as a place for background information and the conclusion as a place to point out further issues that the paper hasn t addressed, but I m not sure if those are good things to recommend.
Students can usually see why that s pretentious and uninformative.
These are generally saved until the bitter end. For too much information, it is generally an issue of filling up the intro with too much extraneous information, which is not relevant to the overall paper. After deciding what must be there, and what is unnecessary, the fat is trimmed. More often, it is a case of too little information, people not wanting to give away the punch line of the paper. Here I tell them that the introduction is a sort of map to the rest of the paper.