An abstract is a little text that tells the whole story of your research. It's often the only thing that a reader can access so you need to get it right. Sioux McKenna. For more on this, visit: postgradenvironments.com

1. Writing the Abstract
Sioux Mckenna
s.mckenna@ru.ac.za
CHERTL

2. Now try to craft an abstract (‘tiny text’)
 What conversation are you engaging/what prior research is your paper
connecting with? What is your angle? (LOCATE)
 Identify the particular problem or question or issue that your paper will
explore? (FOCUS)
 Summarise major findings and outline research approach taken, sample,
method of analysis (REPORT)
 Open up the argument and return to your angle – what will your analysis
show? What is your contribution? (ARGUE)
(From Kamler and Thomson, 2004)
Thanks to Sherran Clarence

3. Possible example 1
(Clarence, 2012)
This paper discusses the role of a writing centre in creating spaces for talk
about and change in disciplinary writing pedagogy. It asks how
collaborative partnerships between disciplinary academics and Writing
Centre practitioners might be established and nurtured sustainably.
Drawing on insights from two collaborations with academics in political
studies and law, the article asserts that writing centre practitioners play a
valuable role in talking about and changing the way academic writing and
literacy is taught in the disciplines. This is shown by working consistently
with the understanding that critical reading, thinking and writing are literacy
acts rather than generic skills and must therefore be learned and practiced
in the disciplines. By supporting disciplinary academics in re-examining
course outcomes, materials and assessments, and moving away from a
‘skills approach’ to writing, it is shown that building discipline-specific
spaces for writing and literacy development is possible through these
collaborative partnerships.
Thanks to Sherran Clarence

4. Possible example 2
(Kamler & Thomson, 2004)
The writing of academic abstracts is more than a tiresome necessity
of scholarly life. It is a practice that goes beyond genre and technique
to questions of writing and identity. In this article we deconstruct a
series of abstracts from a variety of refereed journals to ‘read’ for the
representation of data, argument, methodology and significance. We
describe one strategy for writing abstracts, developed as part of a
long-term project on postgraduate writing pedagogies. We propose
that the art of writing abstracts is neglected in the academy, is given
scant attention by journal editors, and has produced a motley and
often bland array of conventions and genres. We suggest that
abstract art should be an important aspect of supervision if graduate
students and novice researchers are to stake a claim in the academy.
Thanks to Sherran Clarence

5. What purpose does the abstract serve?
 Overview of whole paper
 states the thesis statement/central argument/ ‘take home
message’,
 states main findings,
 States methods
 Positions it in terms of context and/or key concepts
 Often the only part people read!
 Follow the journal instructions
 Word count
 Style
 References

6. Consider the readership
 Specialist or general?
 What terminology can you use and what do you need to
explain or revise for purposes of short abstract?

9. Discuss your methods: how did you collect and analyse the data?

10. Discuss your results and give the take-
home message
 Sometimes omitted (in descriptive abstracts)
 What answers did you find?
 Was the hypothesis proven/were the research questions
answered?
 What are the implications of this study?
 Why should we care?

11. Avoid
 Acronyms
 Terminology that requires explanation
 References (though depends on journal and you might be able
to include ‘big names’)
 Tables and Figures
 Direct quotes

15. Research indicates that when interactive whiteboards are used well they
can increase student engagement and learning (Glover, Miller, Averis &
Door, 2007; Schuck & Kearney, 2007, 2008). This means it is important to
educate future teachers in how to use interactive whiteboards and how to
incorporate them successfully into their teaching. Current research
indicates that a teacher’s pedagogy or ‘how they teach’ has a major
influence on the quality of student learning outcomes. Thus ‘how teachers
use ICT’ has a great effect on student outcomes. A range of pedagogical
models concerned with the concept of authentic pedagogies are commonly
used within Australian classrooms. Training designed for pre-service
teachers dealing with the pedagogical application of interactive
whiteboards is designed to guide and assess the implementation
according to these pre-existing and widespread pedagogical models. This
paper examines examples of how IWBs can be used in teacher education
as well as how to integrate their use across courses that pre-service
teachers undertake.
Campbell and Kent (2010) Using interactive whiteboards in pre-service
teacher education: Examples from two Australian universities Australasian
Journal of Educational Technology 2010, 26(Special issue, 4), 447-463

16. Utilization of carbon dioxide (CO2) has become an important global issue due to the significant and continuous rise in
atmospheric CO2 concentrations, accelerated growth in the consumption of carbon-based energy worldwide, depletion of
carbon-based energy resources, and low efficiency in current energy systems. The barriers for CO2 utilization include: (1)
costs of CO2 capture, separation, purification, and transportation to user site; (2) energy requirements of CO2 chemical
conversion (plus source and cost of co-reactants); (3) market size limitations, little investment-incentives and lack of
industrial commitments for enhancing CO2-based chemicals; and (4) the lack of socio-economical driving forces. The
strategic objectives may include: (1) use CO2 for environmentally-benign physical and chemical processing that adds
value to the process; (2) use CO2 to produce industrially useful chemicals and materials that adds value to the products;
(3) use CO2 as a beneficial fluid for processing or as a medium for energy recovery and emission reduction; and (4) use
CO2 recycling involving renewable sources of energy to conserve carbon resources for sustainable development. The
approaches for enhancing CO2 utilization may include one or more of the following: (1) for applications that do not require
pure CO2, develop effective processes for using the CO2-concentrated flue gas from industrial plants or CO2-rich
resources without CO2 separation; (2) for applications that need pure CO2, develop more efficient and less-energy
intensive processes for separation of CO2 selectively without the negative impacts of co-existing gases such as H2O, O2,
and N2; (3) replace a hazardous or less-effective substance in existing processes with CO2 as an alternate medium or
solvent or co-reactant or a combination of them; (4) make use of CO2 based on the unique physical properties as
supercritical fluid or as either solvent or anti-solvent; (5) use CO2based on the unique chemical properties for CO2 to be
incorporated with high ‘atom efficiency’ such as carboxylation and carbonate synthesis; (6) produce useful chemicals and
materials using CO2 as a reactant or feedstock; (7) use CO2 for energy recovery while reducing its emissions to the
atmosphere by sequestration; (8) recycle CO2 as C-source for chemicals and fuels using renewable sources of energy;
and (9) convert CO2 under either bio-chemical or geologic-formation conditions into “new fossil” energies. Several cases
are discussed in more detail. The first example is tri-reforming of methane versus the well-known CO2 reforming over
transition metal catalysts such as supported Ni catalysts. Using CO2 along with H2O and O2 in flue gases of power plants
without separation, tri-reforming is a synergetic combination of CO2 reforming, steam reforming and partial oxidation and
it can eliminate carbon deposition problem and produces syngas with desired H2/CO ratios for industrial applications. The
second example is a CO2 “molecular basket” as CO2-selective high-capacity adsorbent which was developed using
mesoporous molecular sieve MCM-41 and polyethylenimine (PEI). The MCM41-PEI adsorbent has higher adsorption
capacity than either PEI or MCM-41 alone and can be used as highly CO2-selective adsorbent for gas mixtures without
the pre-removal of moisture because it even enhances CO2 adsorption capacity. The third example is synthesis of
dimethyl carbonate using CO2 and methanol, which demonstrates the environmental benefit of avoiding toxic phosgene
and a processing advantage. The fourth example is the application of supercritical CO2 for extraction and for chemical
processing where CO2 is either a solvent or a co-reactant, or both. The CO2 utilization contributes to enhancing
sustainability, since various chemicals, materials, and fuels can be synthesized using CO2, which should be a sustainable
way in the long term when renewable sources of energy are used as energy input.
Song, C (2010) Global challenges and strategies for
control, conversion and utilization of CO2 for sustainable
development involving energy, catalysis, adsorption and
chemical processing Catalysis Today
Volume 115

17. The lack of temporal information is an important limitation of life cycle assessment
(LCA). A dynamic LCA approach is proposed to improve the accuracy of LCA by
addressing the inconsistency of temporal assessment. This approach consists of first
computing a dynamic life cycle inventory (LCI), considering the temporal profile of
emissions. Then, time-dependent characterization factors are calculated to assess
the dynamic LCI in real-time impact scores for any given time horizon. Although
generally applicable to any impact category, this approach is developed here for
global warming, based on the radiative forcing concept. This case study
demonstrates that the use of global warming potentials for a given time horizon to
characterize greenhouse gas emissions leads to an inconsistency between the time
frame chosen for the analysis and the time period covered by the LCA results.
Dynamic LCA is applied to the US EPA LCA on renewable fuels, which compares the
life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of different biofuels with fossil fuels including
land-use change emissions. The comparison of the results obtained with both
traditional and dynamic LCA approaches shows that the difference can be important
enough to change the conclusions on whether or not a biofuel meets some given
global warming reduction targets.
Levasseur, A., Lesage, P., Margni, M., Deschenes, L., and
Samson, R. (2010) Considering Time in LCA: Dynamic
LCA and Its Application to Global Warming Impact
Assessments Environmental Science Technology, 44 (8),
pp 3169–3174

18. You write the abstract last
 But we’re writing a ‘holding text’ version now as an exercise. It
will change significantly as you draft the actual article.

19. Putting it all together
 250 to 400 words – check requirements of target journal and
look at examples from target journal