Academic Writing for Military Personnel by Adam Chapnick

Author:Adam Chapnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN, LAN014000
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Published: 2009-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

(1) the ICBL;

(2) the process in the United States which led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003;

(3) the two processes comparatively; and concludes by

(4) noting that the two processes were less successful than anticipated for largely the same reasons: the overwhelming weaknesses of unilateral approaches to world affairs in the post-Cold War world.

Your introduction will be more complicated if your methodology— your means of proving your point—is less straightforward. If, for example, your essay uses selected cases as evidence, you have to justify why you chose to include the cases that you did (as well as why you excluded others). In “The Officer Corps and the Profession,” Colonel Collins chooses a book by Samuel Huntington as one of his models for thinking about civil-military relations because, in Collins’ words, “The Soldier and the State is the classic beginning for discussion on the issue of profession and the post-World War II military.”7 Similarly, if you are using a theoretical framework, you have to justify that selection as well as provide the reader with a summary of its main tenets (the details of the summary will likely be included in the body of the essay). In the same article, Collins refers to Abbott’s The System of Professions:

paying particular attention to his major concept that professions are dynamic, competitive, and evolving in a world of changing jurisdictions. The resulting descriptive model of profession provides a new perspective for studying the evolution, or transformation, within the individual Service officer corps, inter-Service competition, as well as changing concepts of war and combatants.8

In terms of baseline lengths for high quality introductions, as usual, there is no hard and fast rule. Typically, however, we have found that the best introductions take up no more than 5% of a good paper. Major Lizotte’s half-page introduction is more than sufficient for his twelve-page article. As papers get longer (for example, book length), introductions might account for an even smaller percentage of the whole.

Keeping the introduction relatively short is important for two reasons. First, it forces you to be clear and to the point, making it more likely that your reader will understand the basis of your argument right away. Second, it allows you to maximize the words you dedicate to argument and evidence, where you have the best opportunity to make your case convincing. Since most academic papers have word limits, determining the length of any section is a zero sum game. Dedicating an extra paragraph to your introduction means that you have that less space in the rest of your paper to prove your main points.

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