Early Abstract Revisions

Early Abstract Revisions

10:48 PM   Abstract, Course, Jargon,

The second week was mostly spent in revising the short abstract that you wrote in order to focus/pinpoint what you will be writing about for the rest of the semester. 

Most of you have done a good job with this, although some further tweaking of the initial output will be required. Overall, the thing that most of you have to watch out for is "wordiness," and also the usage of complicated, or esoteric academic jargon that can very easily be replaced with simpler, cleaner forms of expression. Although there will be times when academic terms will have to be used, in most of the cases that I pointed out to you today, this usage was unnecessary. What you have to say is much better expressed in words that are "your own." Another thing that it will be good to watch out for are overlong sentences, that can easily be broken into shorter ones.

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Writing an Abstract

Writing an Abstract

11:58 AM   Abstract, Definition,

An abstract is not the same as the introduction of your text. Instead, an abstract is a summation of your entire text. Usually publications will impose a limit on your abstract - the most common one is 300 words, although sometimes this can go up as far as 500, and sometimes it can be as low as 100 words. The idea is to get the main points of your text into this narrow word count in such a way that someone who reads your abstract knows immediately whether your text is of interest to them, whether it holds material that they can cite from in their own work - in short whether they should continue to read the actual paper itself. Below are two examples that show you how an abstract can be put together:

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