Guidelines for Writing Abstracts

1. To present the text of an article or a paper in the form of either an indicative or an informative abstract one should re­arrange the material of the original so that it contains a certain number of words (from about 100 up to 500) according to the de­mands of the publishers, following the rigorous recommendations concerning its function, content and form.

2. It is generally agreed that abstracts should include four main topics: purpose, methods, results and conclusions, following the compositional structure of the work it is based on. This con­ventional order of an abstract is preferable.

3. An abstract should be a self-contained text. Short abstracts can be written as a single, unified, coherent paragraph, but for long documents more than one paragraph should form an abstract. Most of indicative abstracts are organized as a single paragraph, their average length being from 100 words (or less) up to 250 words. In informative abstracts the number of structural elements of the original determines the number of paragraphs, the length of such abstracts usually reaches 500 words.

4. The transitional elements smoothing the flow of ideas between the paragraphs and sentences and indicating the stated infor­mation are greatly reduced in abstracts to save space. In indicative abstracts the tran­sitional elements are practically eliminated; in informative abstracts short connective words are used, such as; hence, as, for, in, of, at, thus, now, if, etc.

5. It is more likely for an indicative abstract to precede the original. In this case the passive voice of either present or past tenses seems to be a typical stylistic feature especial­ly in the statements in which the receiver of the action should be stressed. In all other cases both in indicative and informa­tive abstracts the active voice of verbs is used, whenever pos­sible: it contributes to clear, brief and forceful writing.

6. In indicative abstracts the verbs of thematic groups of presentation of material, of forming ideas and of reasoning are mainly used. In informative abstracts (besides these basic verbs) the verbs of other thematic groups are used too.

(Derived from Korneeva, M. [25])

Stages of Writing Abstracts

(developed by the author)

1. Analyze the logic of the original text; see into how many parts it falls and how many and which subtopics it develops (each part develops its own subtopic).

2. See the paragraphs which develop the same subtopic. Are any of them repeating/ paraphrasing the information presented beforehand?

3. Make a plan of the article paying attention to the singled out subtopics. Make use of the key points (words, phrases or sentences); Note: If the author provides his/ her sub-points and they sound ambiguous, be ready to provide your own names that clarify the expressed problems.

4. For each point of your plan prepare theses. Select linguistic material for the theses by:

1. using the author’s expressions/ sentences when they can be directly taken from the text without any changes;

2. paraphrasing them;

3. generalizing the contents if they are expressed in too many words;

5. Check the reduced variant of the text to see if it presents the material logically and keeps no extra or irrelevant information.

6. Compare the reduced variant with the original.

7. Write the reduced variant of the text.

APPENDIX D