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It’s common advice to draft abstracts (and introductions) last — how can you know what you’re going to say until you’ve written it? But one of the techniques I’ve been experimenting with recently has been writing the abstract first. I first came across this idea in one of the ANU’s PhD bootcamp courses, and I find it’s actually really helpful to have my argument mapped out before I being writing.
First, I work out my storyline. There are a couple of different ways of doing this (Belcher outlines a few in her journal article workbook), but I like the one I was taught in the course. This is based on a book by Randy Olsen, and it has the structure of
x AND y –> two statements that set out the current situation
BUT z –> the ‘trouble’, or the reason the research needs to happen
THEREFORE a –> how and what you did to address the ‘trouble’.
The brilliance of this formula is that you don’t need to have fully worked out your argument (or even have done the study yet) to complete the storyline, but it gets you thinking about what you want to say.
Then, I draft the abstract. Pat Thomson calls these ‘tiny texts’ and it’s brilliant for organising your thoughts and providing a mini road-map for your article or chapter. The tiny text version in Detox your writing by Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamlerhas four moves, but we were taught an expanded version with six moves (1 sentence each) from How to fix your academic writing trouble:
LOCATE the study — what are you responding to, developing or reacting to?
FOCUS for your reader — what will your paper address? What is your specific topic or research question?
ANCHOR your work in your discipline by introducing your lens or method
REPORT what happened — what did you find?
ARGUE for the knowledge created — this is usually the answer to your research question
EXPLAIN the significance – what have you added to your field? What can others do with this knowledge?
I’ve been using this process as I work on drafting my journal article. Each time I change argument (I’m onto my third attempt!) I redraft the abstract. Each time takes about half an hour or so — not a huge amount of time. I’ve also started drafting abstracts for my tentative thesis chapters as ways of structuring them. It’s also a helpful way to give my supervisors a summary of what I’m planning.
I’m also going to experiment with a third step based on Pat Thomson’s slides in this blog post, where she advises using the abstract to explicitly plan the paper with headings and word counts, and then add bullet points for each heading. I’m hoping this will make the process of getting words on the page a bit easier.
