Abstracts and the Writing of Abstracts (Volume 1)

by John M. Swales, Christine Feak

Today's research world demands a variety of different abstracts to serve different purposes. As a result, writing abstracts can be a difficult task for graduate and international students, researchers, and even practiced authors. Abstracts and the Writing of Abstracts is designed to demystify the construction of this essential writing form and to equip scholars with the skills to summarize their work in clear and compelling ways.

This volume represents a revision and expansion of the material on writing abstracts that appeared in English in Today's Research World.

The Abstracts volume focuses on abstracts for research articles before addressing abstracts for short communications, conferences, and PhD dissertations. It also covers keywords, titles, and author names. Wherever appropriate within the text, Language Focus sections discuss options and provide tips for meeting specific linguistic challenges posed by the writing of different types of abstracts.

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

John Malcolm Swales was an English linguist. He joined the University of Michigan as a faculty member in 1985. He retired in 2006 as professor emeritus of linguistics and co-director of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English project.
Swales was best known for his work on genre analysis, particularly with regard to its application to the fields of rhetoric, discourse analysis, English for Academic Purposes and, more recently, information science. His writing has studied second language acquisition.

Reviews

[Francis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fear I might be rating more on the fact that I was already pretty familiar with the genre before I started this book, because it definitely reaches the same level of professionalism and detail as the others in this series. I just didn’t get as much new information out of this one as I had with others in the series. The structured abstracts section was more new to me than others, but I’m not sure that I will be writing many of those in my field so it wasn’t as useful. But overall, still a helpful book for those just learning the genre. For those with more experience already, perhaps this isn’t as necessary.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful book with lots of practical advice for writing abstracts of various types. Some more specific information about differences between trends in different disciplines rather than merely the prompting to look at abstracts in one's own discipline for oneself might have been more useful. Likewise, I continue to search for a book that provides advice for how to write abstracts of various lengths (but pertaining to the same project) without repeating oneself.