The abstract acts as the medium of making the first impression of your research on your readers. Conveying a brief summary of the work done, the abstract is a synopsis of the contents of your document. It helps the readers in deciding whether reading your content would be valuable or not. This is because the abstract’s chief purpose is to deliver a general idea of the thesis content to the reader. Further, the abstract also aims at triggering the interest in reading your work. Therefore, it is essential to compose an abstract well.
An abstract is generally present at the beginning of thesis, just instantly after the title page. Written in a concise and readable manner, it includes only the essential information such as the problem under investigation, the intention of research, questions and hypotheses related to the study, research methodology and plan, and a general description of subjects involved, findings, conclusions, and recommendations. Well, the challenge is to include all these details in not more than 200 to 300 words.
Many tend to write a draft abstract before writing the thesis. It only gets finalized once the thesis is over. The writing is in direct speech, with no details repeated. There is no background information, reviews, symbols or acronyms, descriptions of methods, definitions, or citations or references.
According to the universally accepted guidelines, you need to utilize past tense while referring to what was done and found at each phase of the research, present tense to include a remark, active verbs whenever possible, and a reporting, not commenting tone.
While you are planning what to include in the abstract, there are some questions for you to consider so that you do not forget to add or misrepresent any information. You should ask the following questions to yourself:
Of all, it is very important to include the results. Sadly, most people err by not writing the results in the abstract. Remember, the main function of your thesis is not to convey what you did but to tell what you found. It is advisable to dedicate the last half of the research abstract to interpreting and summarizing the results.
Many tend to write a draft abstract before writing the thesis. It only gets finalized once the thesis is over. The writing is in direct speech, with no details repeated. There is no background information, reviews, symbols or acronyms, descriptions of methods, definitions, or citations or references.
According to the universally accepted guidelines, you need to utilize past tense while referring to what was done and found at each phase of the research, present tense to include a remark, active verbs whenever possible, and a reporting, not commenting tone.
While you are planning what to include in the abstract, there are some questions for you to consider so that you do not forget to add or misrepresent any information. You should ask the following questions to yourself:
- What does my thesis address?
- How significant it is to address the problem or question?
- Why did I do my research? What was interesting/useful about my project?
- How did I perform the research?
- What did I find?
- What inferences did I draw? What do they indicate?
- What others have written on my topic of thesis?
Of all, it is very important to include the results. Sadly, most people err by not writing the results in the abstract. Remember, the main function of your thesis is not to convey what you did but to tell what you found. It is advisable to dedicate the last half of the research abstract to interpreting and summarizing the results.
