Instructions
Overview
This assignment provides an opportunity to write an abstract based on a technical report manuscript. This assignment is worth 50 points. Submit your assignment per the instructions below by the due date.
Background – Abstract Writing
Most journal articles that have “front matter,” which includes an informative summary, called an Abstract. These summaries help readers:
• Learn the main points without reading the entire document
• Build a mental framework to organize and understand the information they will encounter
• Determine whether the publication is useful to their research
Abstracts distill the main points from the full document, usually in a page or less, together with enough background information about purpose and method to help readers understand the context in which the key information was developed. Abstracts are ideally suited to readers who want to make decisions or take other action based on the findings, conclusions, and recommendations reported in the document.
Anderson (2010, p. 283) provides guidelines to ensure that the abstract is reader-centered:
• Make it 100 percent redundant with the communication. This purposeful redundancy provides a complete and understandable message to the reader who reads nothing else in the communication. It also means that the abstract can’t serve as the introduction, even though the introduction that follows may seem repetitious.
• Mirror the structure of the overall communication. Include information from each major part of the communication, presented in the order of the parts in the paper
• Meet the needs of your readers. For instance, if you know that your readers will be primarily interested in a novel method you used, provide more detail about the method than you would for readers who are primarily interested in your results. Likewise, in deciding what to include from any part of the full document, pick the information your specific readers will find most useful.
• Be specific. Replace general terms with precise ones. Instead of saying that it was “hot,” say that it was “150°.” Rather than saying the less expensive alternative “saved money,” say that it saved “$43,000 per month.” The more specific your abstract, the more useful it will be to your readers.
• Keep it short. Summaries are typically only 2 to 5 percent of the length of the body of the communication (not counting attachments and appendixes). That’s between half a page and a whole page for every twenty pages in the body of your communication. (The APA Style Manual suggests that abstracts be about 150-250 words in length).
• Write concisely. Abstracts need to be lean but highly informative. Keep them short by eliminating unnecessary words, not by leaving out information important to your readers.
• Follow APA guidelines for writing an abstract. Format according to APA.
Instructions
Write an abstract of the manuscript found on the Written: Writing an Abstract Assignment page under Written: Writing an Abstract Resource. In addition to Anderson’s (2010, p. 283) points above, you will be graded on the following:
• Follow the organization of the scholarly research journal (IRM&D Framework):
1. Purpose of the study (Introduction),
2. Methods,
3. Statistical Results (Data collected).
4. Discussion of practical implications of the study (Look to the future. Who will benefit? How?)
• Only cite research from this study.
• Note: One of the key differences between the Abstract and the Executive Summary (which we write later) is Abstracts follow the IRM&D framework (listed above) and Executive Summaries begin with the results.
Requirements
• POST: Upload your abstract in DOCX, DOC, or PDF by the deadline
Evaluation
• Refer to the rubric posted with assignment.
Note: Your assignment will be checked for originality via the Turnitin plagiarism tool.
References
Anderson, P. (2014). Technical communication: A Reader-centered approach (8th ed.) Boston: Cengage Learning. pp. 279-285.
