How to write a philosophy paper

Get right down to business! Avoid inflated, rhetorical introductory remarks (commonly known as "fluff"). If, for instance, your paper is on abortion, you shouldn't waste limited space with some irrelevant and long-winded spiel about what an important and controversial issue abortion is. Nor should you start your paper off with a sentence like, “Down through the ages, mankind has pondered the problem of....” Nevertheless, you should motivate your paper, explaining what issue or problem that you will be addressing and why it’s important—just keep it brief.

An introduction is best thought of as a reader's guide to your paper. It should help make it easier for the reader to follow and understand your paper. It should include an explicit statement of what it is that you will be arguing for (that is, your thesis), and define for the reader any terminology that’s needed to understand your thesis. The introduction should also map out the structure of your paper, explaining the order in which you will argue for various points and explaining how all those points come together in support of your thesis. To sum up, a good introduction should: (1) be concise, (2) contain a clear statement of your thesis, (3) introduce, very succinctly, your topic and explain why it is important, (4) indicate, very briefly, what the main line of argument will be, and (5) map out the overall structure of your paper.

Illustration: 

The following are two examples of the type of introduction that I am looking for. The first is Mary Anne Warren's introduction to her paper "On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion," The Monist 57 (January 1973)—reprinted in Tom L. Beauchamp and LeRoy Walters, eds., Contemporary Issues in Bioethics, 3rd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1989), p. 211:

We will be concerned with both the moral status of abortion, which for our purposes we may define as the act which a woman performs in voluntarily terminating, or allowing another person to terminate, her pregnancy, and the legal status which is appropriate for this act. I will argue that, while it is not possible to produce a satisfactory defense of a woman's right to obtain an abortion without showing that a fetus is not a human being, in the morally relevant sense of that term, we ought not to conclude that the difficulties involved in determining whether or not a fetus is human make it impossible to produce any satisfactory solution to the problem of the moral status of abortion. For it is possible to show that, on the basis of intuitions which we may expect even the opponents of abortion to share, a fetus is not a person, and hence not the sort of entity to which it is proper to ascribe full moral rights.