Abstracts
The abstract may be a tiny text but it makes a big contribution. It is not merely a summary of your thesis, but one that powerfully shares your argument.
Working on the abstract helps us communicate the story of our research in a way that focuses attention, both reader and writer, stripping down a large text to its simplest parts, in a way that does not weaken the strength of the text but foregrounds it. Writing the abstract while our research is in process can be useful for signaling the bigger steps in our work: our movements from what we know to what we don’t know, the motivation behind these movements, our backgrounds, our social location, and our investments in the journey.
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Drafting the abstract
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There are different ways of drafting an abstract. The research story is a tool you can use while you are still brainstorming ideas for your abstract.
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Once upon a time researchers/policymakers/people believed that…
But what I think is….
So what I did was….
And what I found is….
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And this could change the way we…
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The research problem, previous developments in the field, your hypothesis, your methods, findings and argument can all be expressed within five lines, and without using heavy jargon.
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The next step would be to turn this into academic prose. While some researchers structure their abstract in chronological order, summarizing each chapter of their thesis into a 100 word paragraph, other researchers adopt an ‘hour glass’ approach. They start broad, outlining the field, then narrow down to the specifics of their argument before going broad again, foreshadowing their findings and contribution to the field.