Goals, Strategies and Language Use in Abstracts

In the previous section, we briefly discussed the overall goals that researchers try to achieve in an Abstract, such as presenting the current knowledge on the topic of research or presenting study discoveries. Here, we first delineate the Goals of Abstract writing, and next we will explore the Strategies that are used to achieve those goals. We will also show some sample Language Use in Abstracts to implement the strategies and realize the overall goals. To learn those strategies, we invite you to take a similar approach to other chapters in this book and start with a preliminary sample analysis and examination. As stated in the previous chapters of the book, the key to writing an academically plausible Abstract is to read published samples and analyze those to learn about what strategies their authors have used to hone and develop a scholarly Abstract. Once more, we remind you that a preliminary analysis and reading of scholarly samples of Abstracts prior to writing your own is a dual-purpose process whereby you not only gain information about the new research but learn the lexico-grammatical features and formatting conventions of Abstract writing in your fields. In what follows we will describe the overall goals and their formatting, the strategies and the lexico-grammatical features that can be found in Abstracts.

• There are Five goals that an Abstract can achieve. What do you think they are?

• What common language expressions (e.g., recent research has investigated…) do you think can be found in each goal? Why are these expressions important? What verb tense do you think is used in an Abstract?

Communicative Goals and Strategies in Abstracts

We have merged the discussion of goals and strategies that are used to fulfill goals here since they had been discussed under the various chapters of the book extensively. The traditional Abstract mirrors some of the important moves and strategies of the main sections of a research, albeit in a very condensed way. There are five goals that must be achieved for an effective Abstract. These goals include: Introduce Research, Describe Research Intention, Describe Methods, Present Research Results, and Present Concluding Remarks. In the next sections, we will go over each of these Goals and present the Strategies and Language Use in order to fulfill each Goal.