““You truly engage readers in the introduction when you convince them that it’s worth their time to keep reading, which means making a variety of credible promises (implicit and explicit) about both the value of the problem you will solve (usually explicit: “We have an inadequate or limited theory of early modern sexuality”), your professional credibility for addressing that problem (both explicit and implicit: you show the reader that you understand and know the field in which the problem takes place), and, ideally, by writing sentences or laying out ideas in ways that are rhetorically, rhythmically, or lexically appealing (always implicit). By having, in other words, some kind of style.””
