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T. R. Girill
Society for Technical Communication/Lawrence Livermore Nat. Lab. (retired)
[email protected]
Technical Writing: Abstracts as Disciplined Writing Practice
In the March/April, 2024, issue of NSTA's The Science Teacher (pp. 27-28)
Alexander Eden describes how he built science literacy for his tenth
grade students by having them construct abstracts for the articles
that they read every two weeks (for example, from Scientific
American).
One can expand this basic summarization activity to give students an
authentic introduction to technical text design with real-world value.
For example, national laboratories in the U.S. often teach abstract-
drafting workshops for their summer-student interns to give them
valuable 'workforce-development' skills. Here are three such
enrichment possibilities.
Stand-Alone Adequacy
Although scientific journals usually print an abstract at the
beginning of each technical article, the biggest benefit often
goes to readers who have not seen the abstracted article at all.
Online abstract databases circulate those summary paragraphs
around the world to scientists (and students) who may never see
the full article--in fact, searchers often scan isolated abstracts
to decide which complete papers to retrieve and read, filtering
out less relevant ones just based on the author's 100-to-200-word
summary. (A free example science-abstract database is available
at osti.gov, from the U.S Office of Scientific and Technical
Information.)
Each scientist's summary of their professional work in the abstract
that they prepare thus serves not just as an introduction to their
full technical report, but also as a surrogate for it. So
responsible scientists, knowing this, design each abstract to
accurately and astutely reveal the most valuable features of their
work in isolation, even without the full article text. Students
too can aim for such stand-alone helpfulness.
Second-Language Readers
Science is international. Technical abstracts are usually published
in English, yet many readers of a science article's abstract are
not native English speakers. While much terminology will be dictated
by the topics summarized, the framing vocabulary and sentence
structure are choices that the writer makes. If the chosen words
are obscure or pedantic, or if the sentence structure is needlessly
complex, many readers will be confused or will misunderstand key
assertions or comparisons. Since the goal of sharing abstracts
widely is to expand a paper's audience, good abstract writers
embrace the special responsibility of drafting text that remains
clear, coherent, and helpful to as broad a multi-language audience
as possible.
Signaling Text Structure
Because of space limitations, most science journals publish abstracts
as unannotated text paragraphs. But that just makes the above
interpretation challenges harder. So the influential Journal of
the American Medical Association (JAMA, at jamanetwork.com/
journals/jama) now asks contributors to decompose their article
abstracts using revealing, content-clarifying subheads, such as:
*Importance ('may improve surgery outcomes')
*Objective ('to assess the safety of...')
*Design (setting, participants, duration...)
*Intervention ('left atrial appendage ligation...')
*Main Outcome ('freedom from atrial arrhythmias')
*Results ('effectiveness was only 64%').
Students who practice subdividing and signaling the role of each
text chunk in their abstracts will help themselves screen out
irrelevancies and focus their key claims, even if these content-
signaling subheads disappear from the final version. After all,
JAMA introduced abstract subheads not to help student readers,
but rather for busy medical professionals. Everyone benefits from
added textual clarity.
[For a big-picture overview of effective technical text, see
http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/handbooktoc
For more on writing successful science abstracts, see
http://writeprofessionally.org/techlit/abstracts-analysis]
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