What Is an Abstract?
The scientific style is quite rich in genre diversity and contains several varieties. One of them includes abstracts, summaries, and annotations. This type of texts is called scientific-informative style, that is, thanks to these genres, the reader receives the necessary short knowledge of a particular subject.
The abstract is one of the forms of the abbreviated scientific text presentation. Its purpose is to attract the attention of the audience and awaken the reader's interest by combining the essence of the study with the minimum amount of linguistic means. It is a brief content of the main content of the source (book, journal, article, research paper). The main task of the abstract is to describe the material, to indicate its advantages and features. There are some requirements for the structure and content of the abstract.
Your abstract should summarize the content of the article. It is not necessary to use general phrases in the text, as well as to specify non-essential details and well-known facts. The history (issues history) can be presented if it is directly related to the disclosure of the research purpose.
Avoid direct repeats of any piece of the work. The title of the article should not be duplicated in the abstract.
Logic and Clarity of the Presentation
The abstract should be extremely clear and small in volume. You must specify only the most important and relevant information. It is not recommended:
- to include the tables, drawings, diagrams, charts and formulas into the abstract;
- to refer to the publications;
- to use abbreviations and symbols that differ from commonly used ones.
When writing an abstract it is necessary to remember, it must be created in the form of a short essay, which allows you to determine the need to refer to the full text of the article. It will assess the depth of the research, its novelty, and relevance. Your abstract should be understandable for the audience.
Rules of Writing an Abstract
- The brief description of the presented primary source should not retell its contents. You cannot use a sentence or phrase from the paper in the abstract.
- Numbers, tables, and intranets are out of place here.
- Before writing an abstract to the paper, it is worth knowing that materials that are not mentioned in it are not needed. This is unnecessary information.
- If the title of the article does not decipher its theme, subject, purpose, and relevance, it should be done in the abstract.
- The results of the work must be described by accurate and extremely informative phrases.
- It is appropriate to recall the patterns and interrelationships found in the process of work, emphasizing their novelty.
It can be concluded that the abstract should contain only the most relevant data. Therefore, you should write it after you have created the entire work. As you can see, it is a rather small text, which is not difficult to write at all. Follow these recommendations, and you will learn how to create good abstracts.