OK, KIDS. Gather around.

One of my PhD students, the one who is closest to finishing her doctoral dissertation, is assembling her 3 papers-style dissertation. As such, she is writing her introductory chapter.

I realized I have no resource on my blog on how to write...

... the introductory chapter of the doctoral dissertation.

So here it goes.

I have written blog posts that offer suggestions on how to write components of the dissertation elsewhere. This is my page with Resources for Graduate Students http://www.raulpacheco.org/resources/resources-for-graduate-students/">https://www.raulpacheco.org/resources...

My blog post on the Global Dissertation Narrative (GDN) offers a stepping stone to help doctoral candidates think through what their entire dissertation accomplishes.

http://www.raulpacheco.org/2020/01/the-global-dissertation-narrative-gdn-a-strategy-to-develop-a-final-doctoral-dissertation-story/

IN">https://www.raulpacheco.org/2020/01/t... THEORY, candidates should have already thought about many of these elements.

Once they advance to candidacy, they HAVE thought about these issues (see my post on what students should know before advancing to candidacy and/or defending their proposal http://www.raulpacheco.org/2018/06/developing-the-core-elements-of-a-research-proposal-finding-a-gap-in-the-literature-mapping-contributions-to-scholarship/)

I">https://www.raulpacheco.org/2018/06/d... also wrote a blog post on how to prepare a sort-of checklist for the thesis.

This blog post (the one shown below) http://www.raulpacheco.org/2018/01/preparing-the-core-elements-of-the-phd-dissertation-towards-the-thesis-defense/">https://www.raulpacheco.org/2018/01/p... offers a list of elements that I think every about-to-defend PhD candidate should have absolute mastery on.

Different supervisors may suggest contrasting elements or tables of contents for the dissertation.

The way I would encourage my students to write their introductory chapters is very similar to the one I suggest

- for papers http://www.raulpacheco.org/2018/02/how-to-write-the-introduction-to-a-research-paper/">https://www.raulpacheco.org/2018/02/h... and

- for book manuscripts http://www.raulpacheco.org/2018/06/how-to-write-the-introduction-of-a-book-manuscript/

Approximately,">https://www.raulpacheco.org/2018/06/h... this is how I would write a PhD thesis intro chapter.