Hi, my name's Tom and welcome back to another PhD vlog. Last month's video was
far more of a roving affair in which I took you on a journey with me back to my
hometown of Plymouth, in doing so explaining a little bit about what my
PhD research is actually about. I'm certainly planning on making a fair few
more videos in that style in the near future. However, mostly owing to deadlines
and a lot of time pressure pre-Christmas, this month's video is going to be a
little bit more of a sat down affair. It's been quite some time since I made a
how-to video and while preparing that video last month
I really started to think about how, in providing a brief explanation of my PhD
research, I was essentially putting together and (albeit quite expanded) video
abstract for my research. So, this month, I thought I'd put together a quick video
on my process for putting together an abstract either for a conference paper
for submission or for a journal article. So this video is a little bit of an
insight into my abstract-writing process which you will likely be able to build
upon and expand and mould for your own purposes. As usual it will be mostly
useful for those in the humanities as that's where my research sits, however,
I'm sure the fundamental ideas will be useful across disciplines, potentially
even into the sciences. Of course, if you're new round here and this seems
like your kind of thing then please do consider subscribing and potentially
hitting that little notification bell so that you are the first to hear about my
videos as they are released. That would all be much appreciated. With that out
the way, however, let's crack on with it. So, without wanting to patronize in any
way, it seems to me that the first question is: what is an abstract for and
what purpose does it serve? And it seems to me that, within academia, there are
two main functions of an abstract. For academic conferences,
abstracts are used as part of a kind of application process. You send an abstract
to a conference organiser and they use that as a way of deciding whether your
research fits in with that conference and whether
to invite you or not. And, if they do decide to invite you, they'll use that
abstract in order to decide where to place you within the conference program.
In terms of journals, sometimes abstracts used in a similar way; I find often
around themed issues where editors are inviting submissions around a particular
topic. However, for the most part, journals will expect you to submit a full draft
of your article on spec. In this context, then, the abstract serves as a kind of
window into your article so that if and when it is published potential readers
can browse that abstract before deciding whether or not to read your full article.
And I think this use of an abstract is sometimes a little bit overlooked. I
think often we prioritize the notion of getting published as being the key goal
but actually, beyond this, as well as just to getting published you want your work
to be read. So, in both these contexts, though it might seem slightly different,
the abstract actually serves a very similar purpose and is very important, as
it's these few hundred words that are likely going to decide whether you get to
present to that conference or not or whether your article gets actual eyes
upon it or not. But, with such a limited word count, then, what should we leave
in and what should we leave out? Well, Phillip Koopman suggests that an
abstract should have five core elements. Your motivation for writing the article
or paper. Your Problem Statement; what are you trying to discover or argue? Your
approach; in the humanities this would often be the theoretical tools that
you'll be building your argument upon. Your results; again, the spoilers. What are
your conclusions? And, finally, what Koopman refers to as conclusions but
what I'd call the impact; why should we care about any of this and what are the
implications of those conclusions that you've come to? While such an approach
might seem a little formulaic, I actually really like this break down of what an
abstract should include. I think that, by using one or two sentences to
answer each of those questions, you can ensure your abstract is balanced, giving
a good, balanced overview of the entire argument contained in the article or
presentation and therefore giving the reader of it the information they need
to make their choice on whether to read or accept that abstract. So, those of you
who are regular viewers of this channel will know that I like examples. I often
think that talking about something entirely theoretically can be just as
confusing as not talking about it at all and so what I thought I'd do was, by way
of an example, try to put together an abstract for a video I recently released
as part of my Politix series on Bojack Horseman. We're going to take these ideas
by Koopman and see how we can take the video on Bojack Horseman and sum it down
into an abstract. So, here is my abstract for How Bojack Horseman Critiques the
1990s. Step one, then, is motivation. And my motivation for creating this video was
fairly clear: TV show is popular, therefore TV show is notable, therefore
discussing that TV show is a worthwhile act. In my abstract, then, I might state
that "Bojack Horseman is an incredibly popular TV show and has been widely
praised for its engagement with contemporary celebrity culture. Here, as
well as just claiming that the TV show is popular, and therefore important to
discuss in that way, I've also hinted at the fact that there has been previous
discussion about this TV show, and therefore that perhaps lends weight to
my decision to discuss it too. My problem statement, then, was that, while I felt that
there have been many conversations surrounding its take on celebrity
culture and mental health—and while I thought that those were important and
incredibly revealing—I felt less had been said about how on the show engages
with how we perceive the past. There was something a gap of a gap in the
discourse here, then, what in academia we potentially call a "gap in the
literature". My problem statement, then, is that I'm gonna solve this gap in the
literature by filling it. So, in my abstract I might
write that "while much has been written about the show's discourses on mental
health and contemporary celebrity culture, less has been said about how the
show critiques our perceptions of the recent past". So, here, we have already a
sense of what's going to be discussed within that video essay. Now I'll move on
to my approach; how am I going to make that discussion and make my eventual
argument. Well, within that video essay, I largely draw on ideas from Frederic
Jameson's book in which he delineates between notions of parody and pastiche,
and it's very much those ideas that formulate my argument. And, here, is a
place where very clearly that role of summarizing what actually takes place
within the video essay itself takes place. Because, within the video itself, I
go to great lengths to introduce Jameson's ideas, to explain them to the
reader in case they're not familiar with them, and to provide nuance and
mould them to my purposes within that video essay. However, within the abstract,
there is no time for that, so you have to grow comfortable with the idea that
your abstract is not going to have all those caveats within it. So, for this
sentence, I'm gonna simplify and simply say that "in this video essay I draw upon
Frederic Jameson's delineation of pastiche and parody within cultural
texts in order to consider the relationship within Bojack Horseman
between the cultural attitudes of the 1990s and the present-day
and the perception of the former from the point of view of the latter". Great, so
now I come to results. This is where, if I'm writing in the humanities (as I always
am), then I'm gonna say what my argument is with an indication as to how that
argument ends. So, here, it's fairly blunt. I'm gonna say that "I argue that, while
Bojack Horseman initially invites us to view the 1990s within the terms of what
Jameson refers to as pastiche, as the series continues, it gradually erodes
this rose-tinted view of the past in order to critique
how we process the recent past". Finally, here, in expressing the importance of
this argument and the impact of my video essay, I think I'm mainly interested in
expressing how my reading of Bojack Horseman potentially elevates it as a
notable point of discussion and it's subversiveness as a cultural text. So, by
doing that, I'm kind of implying, by association, that my video essay is kind
of important because it is my video essay that draws those ideas out of the text. So,
here, I'm going to write that "Through such a manipulation of the audience's
point of view, Bojack Horseman invites the audience to
reinterpret their perceptions of previous cultural eras and thus is a
far more subversive piece of television than we have perhaps previously given it
credit for". What we've ended up with, then, is a far, far from perfect rough first
draft of an abstract that is 191 words long. This gives us a lot of wiggle room. For
example, I might decide to add specifically that I talked at length
about the character of Hank Hippopopolous and the allusions
within Bojack Horseman to crimes committed by Bill Cosby and allegations
towards David Letterman. I would also very, very likely play with the language
a little bit to ensure that it is as articulate and as engaging as
possible. While I'd certainly warn against swallowing a thesaurus and
making it a really flowery or almost-unintelligible-because-it's-so-wordy
abstract, I do think that the adjectives and verbs that we choose to express our
ideas are really important. I often think that using the active voice rather than
the passive voice also helps to articulate why it's important that
you're presenting this piece of work rather than anyone else. For now, however,
I hope that that serves as a useful example of how I go about writing an
abstract. I'm sure that lots of people out there will have lots of ideas to
build on these (or argue against what I've said) and I think that's really
important, it would be great to have those discussions down in the comments. As
always, this is the start of a conversation not the end of one. Central to my
personal approach, I think, and one of the reasons that I found that structure so
useful is remaining pure to the core function of an abstract and retaining
balance throughout, really just explaining to the reader what your work
is about. Because, while flowery words and engaging phrasing can
really help to lift your abstract off the page, it's actually those
fundamentals which will make it do the job that it's meant to do.
Thank you very much for watching! I hope you found this video useful in some way. Again, if you're
new around here then please do consider subscribing and potentially clicking that
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world then a thumbs up always helps to spread the word a little
further and get more people's eyes on this video. Thank you very, very much for
watching once again and have a great week!