Focusing Your Research By Writing the Abstract First

Posté par Colette en date du Sep 5, 2019 dans Buy College Essays | 0 commentaires

LibParlor Contributor, Allison Hosier, discusses how writing an abstract first can help clarify what you are currently talking about.

Allison Hosier is an Information Literacy Librarian during the University at Albany, SUNY. She has published and presented on research associated with practical applications of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy as part of information literacy instruction. Her current scientific studies are focused on examining the metaconcept that scientific studies are both an activity and an interest of study. Follow her on Twitter at @ahosier.

In 2012, I attended a few workshops for new faculty on how best to write very first peer-reviewed article, step-by-step. These workshops were loosely centered on Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks by Wendy Laura Belcher.

Our first assignment? Write the abstract for the article.

These tips was shocking for me together with other new scholars in the room at the time. Write the abstract first? Wasn’t that the right part that has been supposed to come last? How do the abstract is written by you in the event that you don’t even know yet exactly what your article will probably be about?

I have since come to view this as the utmost piece that is useful of advice We have ever received. To such an extent that I meet, both new and experienced that I constantly try to spread the word to other scholars. However, whenever I share this piece of wisdom, I realize that I am generally regarded with polite skepticism, especially by those who strongly feel that your introduction (not as your abstract) is the best written in the final end of the process as opposed to in the beginning. This can be fair. What realy works for just one person won’t necessarily work with another. But I want to share why i do believe beginning with the abstract is useful.

Structuring Your Abstract

“For me, you start with the abstract during the very beginning has the added bonus of helping me establish in early stages exactly what question I’m trying to resolve and exactly why it’s worth answering.”

For every single piece of scholarly or professional writing I have ever written (including that one!), I started by writing the abstract. In doing this, I follow a format suggested by Philip Koopman of Carnegie Mellon University, which I happened upon through a Google search. His recommendation is that an abstract will include five parts, paraphrased below:

• The motivation: Why is this extensive research important?
• The difficulty statement: What problem are you currently trying to solve?
• Approach: How do you go about solving the problem?
• Results: What was the takeaway that is main?
• Conclusions: which are the implications?

To be clear, when I say that I write the abstract at the start of the writing process, after all the very beginning. Generally, it is the first thing i really do after I have a notable idea I think could be worth pursuing, even before I make an effort to do a literature review. This differs from Belcher’s recommendation, which will be to write the abstract once the step that is first of revision as opposed to the first faltering step for the writing process but i do believe the huge benefits that Belcher identifies (a way to clarify and distill your thinking) are the same in either case. Me establish early on exactly what question I’m trying to answer and why it’s worth answering for me, starting with the abstract at the very beginning has the added bonus of helping. In addition believe it is helpful to start thinking in what my approach is likely to be, at least in general terms, before I start so I have a sense of how I’m going to go about answering my big question.

So now you’re probably wondering: if this part comes at the very beginning of this writing process, how Here, http://alldrugs24h.com/, http://allpills24h.com/, http://buycialisonline24h.com/, http://buypills24h.com/, http://buypillsonline24h.com/, http://buysildenafilonline24h.com/, http://buytadalafilonline24h.com/, http://buyviagraonline24h.com/, http://cheapviagraonline.com/, http://help-essay.info/, http://orderviagracheap.com/, http://tadalafilsildenafil.com/, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. can you talk about the results and conclusions? You can’t know very well what those will soon be unless you’ve actually done the study.

“…writing the abstract commits that are first to nothing. It’s just a way to organize and clarify your thinking.”

It’s true that your particular results while the conclusions you draw from them will not actually be known unless you possess some real data to work well with. But keep in mind that research should involve some sort of hypothesis or prediction. Stating everything you think the results will be in the beginning is a way of forming your hypothesis. Thinking by what the implications is supposed to be if your hypothesis is proven makes it possible to think of why your projects will matter.

But what if you’re wrong? Imagine if the total results are completely different? Let’s say other areas of your research change as you go along? Imagine buy essays if you wish to change focus or change your approach?

You could do all those things. In fact, I have done all of those plain things, even with writing the abstract first. Because writing the abstract first commits you to nothing. It’s just a real way to prepare and clarify your thinking.

An Illustration

Let me reveal an early draft associated with the abstract for “Research is a task and a topic of Study: A Proposed Metaconcept and Its Practical Application,” a write-up I wrote that has been recently accepted by College & Research Libraries:

Motivation: As librarians, the transferability of information literacy across one’s academic, professional, and private life is not difficult to understand but students often fail to observe how the skills and concepts they learn as part of an information literacy lesson or course might apply to anything aside from the immediate research assignment.

Problem: A reason with this can be that information literacy librarians concentrate on teaching research as an activity, a method that has been well-supported by the Standards. Further, the process librarians teach is just one associated primarily with only 1 genre of research—the college research essay. The Framework allows more flexibility but librarians may well not be using it yet. Approach: Librarians might reap the benefits of teaching research not only as an action, but as an interest of study, as is through with writing in composition courses where students first study a genre of writing and its own rhetorical context before trying to write themselves.

Results: Having students study several types of research may help cause them to become alert to the many forms research usually takes and could improve transferability of information literacy skills and concepts.

Conclusions: Finding approaches to portray research as not just an action but in addition as a topic of study is more in line with the new Framework.

This really is possibly the first time I’ve looked at this since I originally wrote it. It’s a little messy and as I worked and began to receive feedback, first from colleagues and mentors, then from Here, http://alldrugs24h.com/, http://allpills24h.com/, http://buycialisonline24h.com/, http://buypills24h.com/, http://buypillsonline24h.com/, http://buysildenafilonline24h.com/, http://buytadalafilonline24h.com/, http://buyviagraonline24h.com/, http://cheapviagraonline.com/, http://help-essay.info/, http://orderviagracheap.com/, http://tadalafilsildenafil.com/, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. peer reviewers and editors while I recognize the article I eventually wrote in the information here, my focus did shift significantly.

For comparison, this is actually the abstract that appears in the preprint of the article, that is scheduled to be published in January 2019:

Information literacy instruction on the basis of the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education has a tendency to focus on basic research skills. However, scientific studies are not merely an art but in addition a topic of study. The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education opens the door to integrating the research of research into information literacy instruction via its acknowledgement for the contextual nature of research. This article introduces the metaconcept that research is both an activity and a topic of study. The application of this metaconcept in core LIS literature is discussed and a model for incorporating the scholarly study of research into information literacy instruction is suggested.

So obviously the published abstract is a complete lot shorter as it necessary to fit within C&RL’s guidelines. In addition it does not stick to the recommended format exactly nonetheless it does reflect an evolution in thinking that happened as part of the writing and revision process. The article I ended up with had not been this article I started with. That’s okay.

Then exactly why is writing the abstract first useful if you’re just going to throw it out later? As it focuses your research and writing through the very start. Whenever I first came up because of the idea for my article, I only knew that in reading Naming that which we Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, I had found significant parallels between their work and information literacy. I desired to create I only had a vague sense of what I wanted to say about it but. Writing the abstract first forced me to articulate my ideas in a way that made clear not merely why this topic was of great interest to me but how it may be significant to your profession as a whole.