Tips for Writing an Abstract
An abstract is a brief, powerful statement that details a larger piece of work. The components of an abstract vary depending on the course or discipline. For instance, a social science abstract may enclose the purpose, scope, contents, and work results. For humanities, the abstract may house the thesis, check on background, and the conclusion. It is itself an original document and does not contain excerpts from the passage.
Reasons for writing an abstract
The two key reasons for writing an abstract are indexing and selection. The abstract is a bridge for readers with longer work to help them decide if they should or not read the document. Several databases present online utilize abstract to assist in enormous indexing work. The abstract should, therefore, contain phrases and keywords that give room for fast and easy searching.
When do people jot abstracts?
- When jotting a proposal for a book
- When submitting passages and articles to online journals
- When writing a Ph.D. dissertation or a thesis for Master’s
- When writing a conference paper proposal
The author of the work writes the abstract, but you can outsource an external writer to draft your abstract. In a job that involves multiple authors, the first writer is the one who jots the abstract.
Abstract Types
Abstracts come in two types, informative and descriptive. Both have different purposes and aims, which also trickles down to the difference in styles and components.
Descriptive abstract
This abstract illuminate the type of data retrieved from the work. It does not make any judgments whatsoever about the job, and it also does not give conclusions or results of the research work. It houses the keywords present in the text and may or may not include the research’s methods, scope, and purpose. The descriptive abstracts detail the work getting abstracted. They are usually short and spans about 100 words.
Informative abstracts
Many abstracts are usually informative. A great informative abstract substitutes the work itself. That means that the writer jots and elongates the significant arguments, vital results, and the paper’s evidence. The informative abstract entails the abstract descriptive information, which is the scope, purpose, methods, products, conclusions of the study, and the author’s recommendation.
How to write an abstract
the abstract’s format will entirely depend on the text getting abstracted. A scientific research paper’s abstract will house elements that lack in an article of literature, and the reverse is the same. All abstracts have some things in common like:
- Writing reason: what is the vitality of research? Why would someone have an interest in your work?
- Problem: what issue is the work trying to solve? What is the project’s scope? What are the main arguments of the paper?
- Methodology: a scientific project’s abstract may have approaches or models utilized in the overall study, and others may go ahead and describe the evidence used in the study.
- Results: On the same note, an abstract of a science project may house specific data that details the study results.
- Implications: what are some of the changes that should get made from the results of the project’s findings? How does the work contribute to the knowledge on the topic?
All the abstracts include the following
- Citation of the source of information
- The critical information comes first
- The same style and type of language used in the original
- Phrases and keywords that focus on the work
- Powerful, concise, and precise language
Abstracts may house the following elements
- The thesis of the project that gets covered in the first line or sentence. The first sentence is usually the introductory statement of the project
- The same structure of the original work in chronological orders
- Information of background that puts the work in the broader literature body.