[Music]
The abstract is a very important part of
your thesis or of your research paper.
The key point in the abstract is to be
brief, that is to keep it very short. An
abstract should allow the reader to,
very quickly, see what are the content of
the article. Of course, the title did this
a bit, but this will be a bit more. "A well
prepared abstract can be the most
important single paragraph in an article."
That is when somebody reads your
abstract, that may be the only thing they
read. For sure, when they're looking for
papers, they're going to be reading
abstracts, probably, before they download
or see any paper. So this really is the
most important part of your paper. The
abstract will be very dense with
information. And what does dense mean?
Dense means every sentence is just full
of your variables and the meaning and
the idea, the methodology in the paper,
very compact. It's hard to read. That's
okay. And, basically people looking at
the abstract get the whole idea of the
paper. There's no surprises in your paper,
in other words. Inside the abstract, you
can include keywords and you want to be
very accurate and as detailed as
possible. You should be non-evaluative,
Non-evaluative. What does not evaluative
mean? None-evaluative, this is a great
little word. Non-evaluative here meaning
don't judge or don't say, "This is a great
research. This is the number one
research of all time. This is the best
research. This research was good but not
good enough."
You skip all of that. It's just the facts.
You're really trying to stick with the
facts. So you want to emphasize keeping
the paper readable, keeping the paper
easy to understand. And in the abstract,
exactly the same idea. Don't go off on
some crazy direction, saying things that
are weird.
Keep it very concise. Here are some
things you can include with your
abstract. Let me just run down through
them here we go. Include these points: "The
problem under investigation", that is what
is it you're actually studying, right? "The
participants", what was your sample? "The
essential features.." what were the key
parts of the methodology? Did you use a
sample? Did you use a survey? Did you do a
direct experimentation? Did you use some
kind of chemical analysis? What are the
basic findings? What was the basic results?
Not the detail but just the basics. And
when you give these, you can include
things like your statistical test, your
sample size, your confidence intervals,
confidence intervals meaning how much
deviation is there. What's the standard
deviation? How much probability is there
that things are wrong? And your
significant levels, of course, you can
include these, but very short, not the
details. And, of course, you can come up
with your conclusion and your
implications. So in your abstract, you've
got a lot to do, don't you? Right here are
the key points that you're going to be
including. And it looks to me like that
is more than I could handle,
right? And so, in fact, your abstract is
written the very, very last of everything
else you do. After your thesis is
completely done, packaged up and all
finished, then, you begin writing an
abstract. And it can take many days to
write a good abstract, because you really
do need to focus. You really do need to
get it dense. Really squash down your
whole thesis down to just this short
space.
All right, now, let's do a practice. And this
practice is the abstract. Now, I'm going
to ask you to use the qrp online writing
system and write 100 words, focused on
the abstract. Now, of course, if you have
real research, you can use your real
research. And if you don't, maybe you can
find one that you're interested in, an
existing topic on Google Scholar. So you
kind of just make things up. If you don't
have real research, there's not much else
you can do. The point of this exercise is
to practice writing a little bit, so 100
words. For the abstract, you can use the
qrp ebook which has example sentences.
And don't forget the qrp online system
has online help, that little yellow box
that appears next to where you're
writing. You can click on that and you're
gonna get an online help with many
example sentences. So please don't forget
to use that. Abstract, the key point,
that's really hard, is keep it short.
Here, 100 words is pretty short, but you
really need to focus it down. Good luck!