Abstract

Shorter, more concise nonfiction summaries are called abstracts. An abstract is a brief summary of a research article, thesis, review, conference proceeding or any in-depth analysis of a particular subject or discipline, and is often used to help the reader quickly ascertain the paper's purpose. When used, an abstract always appears at the beginning of a manuscript, acting as the point-of-entry for any given scientific paper or patent application. Abstracting and indexing services for various academic disciplines are aimed at compiling a body of literature for that particular subject.

The terms précis or synopsis are used in some publications to refer to the same thing that other publications might call an “abstract”. In management reports, an executive summary usually contains more information (and often more sensitive information) than the abstract does. There are two types of abstracts are usually used: 1) descriptive abstracts – their purpose is to tell readers what information the report, article, or paper contains; 2) informative abstracts – their purpose is to communicate specific information from the report, article, or a paper.

Process and Hints to Abstract Writing

Writing an abstract you may use the following steps:

1. Reread the article, paper, or a report and look for the following main parts of them: purpose, methods, scope, results, conclusions and recommendation.

2. Use the headings, outline heads, and table of contents as a guide to writing your abstract.

3. If you are writing an abstract about another person’s article, paper, or report, the introduction and the summary are good places to begin. These areas generally cover what the article emphasizes.

4. After you have finished rereading the article, paper, or report, write a rough draft without looking back at what you’re abstracting.

5. Don’t copy key sentences from the article, paper, or report: you’ll put in too much or too little information.

6. Don’t rely on the way material was phrased in the article, paper, or report: summarize information in a new way.

7. Revise your rough draft to correct weaknesses in organization.

8. Drop unnecessary information; add important information that you left out.

9. Fix errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

(По информации http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstracts)

Practical task. a) Choose any text from this textbook that was the most interesting/informative/useful/ understandable for you and/or important for students of your speciality etc. and do the following:

1. Formulate the theme of information from the text, using the following clichés: the text deals with, is concerned with, touches upon, is devoted to, describes etc.

2. Process the information, given in the text in the following way: a) divide the text into several parts according to the content; b) write out a number of key-words to each part of the text; c) retell each part using the key-words but don’t copy key sentences from the article, paper, or report; d) formulate the main idea of the text; e) retell the text in 10-12 sentences.

3. Find out the author’s conclusion in the text and write it down using the following clichés: the following conclusions are drawn…; the author comes to the conclusion that…; in conclusion the author says that … etc.

4. Give your own comments on the information from the text trying to answer the following questions: a) how do you consider the actuality of the information, given in the text; b) how do you think who and for what purposes could use it. Make use of the following clichés: I consider / found the text interesting / informative / useful for my speciality / difficult / easy / to read / to translate / to understand …, the information of the text may be addressed to the students / graduates / engineers / specialists / all those interested in …, the text may be recommended to the postgraduates / bachelors / students …, I find the question / problem of … very important because … etc.

b) Present your abstract of the information from the text according to the following structure:

1. The theme of the text.

2. The main idea of the text.

3. Summary of the text.

4. The author’s conclusion.

5. Your own comments.

SUPPLEMENT 2