Text compression

Practically the process of compression results in four pa­rallel operations: inclusion, exclusion, generalization and paraphrasing.

1. Items to Include. To prepare an abstract special attention should be given to analysis of the paper to choose the essential information from each structural element of the text. The following recommendations should be taken into consideration:

   • A statement of primary objectives, goals and aims of the research or reasons why the ar­ticle was written. These statements should be included in both the informative and in­dicative abstracts.

   • A statement about the way used to obtain the results. If the abstract is informative more details should be included. A statement of using experimental or theore­tical results obtained, data collected, ef­fects observed, etc. The informative abstract tends to be more quantitative than the indi­cative one.

   • A statement of findings dealing with the interpretation or significance of the results, including recommendations, evaluations, appli­cations, suggestions, new relationships and hypothesis accepted or rejected.

2. Items to Exclude. To rearrange the full text of a paper into an abstract the author is forced to save space and to exclude some pieces of in­formation being of the secondary character and some elements of deduction used in the arrangement of the text.

The following items are generally considered to be excluded from abstracts:

• material that is old or well-known to profession;

• detailed description of experiments or methodology;

• unsubstantiated remarks or generally known facts;

• repetitions.

3. Generalization. Limitation of the length of an abstract to a number of words or to a certain part of a page may force an author to ge­neralize. Generalization is an ability to sum up the facts, examples and ideas into a short generalized statement, converging of a number of items into one.

4. Paraphrasing. It’s a deliberate and purposeful rewording of a sentence or passage on condition that the communicative aim and meaning of the original are retained.

(Derived from Korneeva, M [25])

APPENDIX С

Writing abstracts Approaches to Writing Abstracts

The assimilation and dissemination of information by scientists are an integral part of their research and development activities. To be an effec­tive investigator the modern specialist should know what has been discovered, what is being discovered and what is on the brink of discovery or at least under intensive research in his subject-field.

Scientific literature is too large for an individual to acquire or scan. The growing volume of scientific and technical papers makes it increasingly important that the basic content of each document be quickly and accurately identifiable by-readers as the reader's real aim is to keep up with his subject.

The importance of abstracts and abstracting is increasing in the modern world so far as the abstracts summarize current research and also give an initial access to the information contained in a piece of scientific literature.

The intent of an abstract is to present the basic structure of the original paper and report the important findings or new processes presented in a piece of scientific or technical lite­rature. It should be a presentation of the significant content and conclusions of the original piece of primary documentary information and that can be a book, a research report, a perio­dical article, proceedings of a conference, etc. It is intended to stand as a readable and complete item in its own right and is therefore a separate work that can be used for the benefit of research workers. The objective of preparing an abstract is to save a prospective reader's time and effort in finding useful information in a given article, a report, etc.

A well prepared abstract enables the reader to identify the basic content of a document quickly and accurately, and to determine its relevance to his interest.