Guidelines for Writing Effective Abstracts for （指南编写有效的抽象）.pdf

Karen Reys “Paper Stacks” (Photo Chris Geoghegan) (Detail)) Guidelines for Writing Effective Abstracts for Conference Paper Presentations Part One: Form and Content Abstracts submitted for a conference paper should do two things—tell conference participants what you are going to say, and interest them in coming to hear you say it. telling them what you will say • Identify the topic/subject of your paper—the question/problem it raises. • Locate the topic/subject in terms of a field of scholarship—who/what provides the intellectual context for the problem/question the paper raises. • Emphasise your position/proposition—your central idea regarding the question/problem. • Sketch—this is optional—your two/three points of argument. interesting them in hearing you say it • Devise a title that is descriptive and inviting. • Find words that are accessible to both specialists and non-specialists, especially as this is a cross-disciplinary conference (disciplinary terms sometimes seem like jargon to those not in the field). presenting the abstract • Be concise—abstracts for Palimpsests should be no more than 250 words. • Plan the abstract as a single paragraph that is unified (i.e., one topic) and coherent (i.e., ideas flow continuously). Two (maybe even three) paragraphs are OK so long as the abstract as a whole is unified/coherent. • Edit it carefully for grammar, punctuation, typos, etc. • Ensure the abstract conforms to the “house style” of the conference (see Part Two). Of course, often you have not fully written the presentation before you write the abstract. Still the abstract should be much more than an ambit claim—it should be a clear statement of the central idea that the pa