Guiding Your Reader

Your pyramid outline has prepared you to write your report, but you still need a way to alert your readers to your purpose and main message before you begin to present all the evidence. You can do this with your introduction. Although the introduction is not part of your pyramid outline, it is an important part of your report because it guides your readers to the main message.  The introduction helps raise the main question for your readers. It then answers that question by stating the main message.

The purpose of the introduction is to gain the attention of the readers and set the direction for their thinking. For this reason, it has a different structure than your pyramid.

In the first part of this module, you will consider the structure of a good introduction by looking at a few examples.