3b. Draft the General Background section

[Mike Dillinger, PhD]

Section Summary	General background
Length:	≈1 page for draft
	≈1/2 page for final version
Section title:	your process name
Position:	After the Opening; before the Specific Background
Main question to answer:	What are the steps or parts of your process? How does your sub-process work?
Reading strategy:	Look in review articles, book chapters, Lit Reviews of experimental articles

The “general background” section of the Lit Review is the next (after the Opening) first full page or two, in which the author describes, citing many references, how the process and sub-process being studied work in general. This, along with the specific background section, is what most people associate with a Lit Review.

Goals. Your main goal in this section is to prepare the reader to understand your research problem. Not everyone knows a lot about your process and the specific part of it that you want to focus on, the sub-process. If your question is precise, few people (even other researchers) know much about it, so you have to educate your readers. The most direct way is to simply describe how your process works in general, and then provide more details about the sub-process.

Also, this is the time to make a good first impression. Show the reader that you are professional and knowledgeable about the existing literature. Show that you can see how experiments and hypotheses relate to each other. A few simple ways of doing this are: follow APA format very carefully, get your writing revised carefully (for most people, imperfect writing is a reliable indicator of poor thinking), and triple check your facts.

Reading Strategy. Work on the “definitely read” part of your General background pile of materials. When you are writing about how your process and sub-process work, skim article introductions (the beginning of each) for information that you can rephrase or rework. Also, look in review articles for a good overview. Use textbooks for your own background information or only to find references – you never want to cite a textbook or website as a source of research.

Theses and book chapters (not those in textbooks), where authors summarize lots of previous research, are particularly useful places to find information for the general background section.

Organization and what to talk about. There are two kinds of information that are useful for writing this section: characteristics of the process as a whole (when and whether it’s fast, slow, hard, easy, accurate, inaccurate, etc.) and a description of the parts of the process, step by step.

Focus on talking about the facts, not the authors or the studies. Using the author-inside citation style will help.

The easiest way to organize the General Background sentence is to have an introductory sentence or two about the whole process and then separate sentences (in temporal order) about the steps or phases that make up the process. Give further details about the sub-process that you will focus on. You can describe your process by answering questions like: What is known about it? What parts, sub-processes, or phases does it have? What affects each part?

For example, if your process was reading, you would have an initial sentence about reading (citing leading researchers) saying general things (i.e., about the process as a whole). Then, you would have separate sentences for word recognition, sentence analysis, semantic interpretation, and the use of prior topic knowledge.

In each sentence, you will cite important characteristics or findings so the reader can get an idea of how each component works and how they all interact. Simple examples from student papers follow.

See Sample General Background sections.
See Hints for Writing a General Background section.

Read this topic next: Draft the Specific Background