Words: 899
What is abstract in an assignment?
An abstract in assignment is a short summary of your paper that is placed alone separately to the assignment itself. The main purpose of completing an abstract is to give an overview of your work. The reader will read the abstract before he starts reading the whole assignment and this part of the paper is supposed to inform him what he is going to meet inside.
An abstract should not be too long, but it should present the description of what you have done in your paper. It gives the readers a great opportunity to find out what is your assignment about and do not waste their time reading the whole paper if it does not feet their search purposes.
An abstract to the assignment could be of different types, and you need to find out what each of them is supposed to be. An abstract can be:
- Informative
- Descriptive
- Critical
All of them have the same purpose but differ in structuring and organizing. An informative style is used for long technical researches and is a shortened version of your assignment. It provides overview information about everything that was placed in your paper.
A descriptive style gives an explanation of goals, purpose, and methods of your investigation or research. It does not say anything about the results and is much shorter than the informative abstract.
A critical abstract is less popular and requires the critique of work or study that was discussed for the research.
Preparation work before writing
Before you start exactly completing an abstract to your assignment, you need to do some preparation steps. The beginning thing you must keep in mind is to complete the whole paper first. The abstract is a summary of your work, and it would be better to complete it at the end when the whole assignment is ready. It will make this process faster, and you will not omit anything important.
Analyze all the requirements and make sure they are understandable for you. Your task should include all the important information that you must take into consideration. Read it carefully to understand what the length of your abstract should be and what style it is. Think carefully about whether you should write to your instructor or for publication as this fact considerably influences the way of writing.
Think about your audience. Who are they? You need to know who you are appealing to when you are writing. After understanding who your readers are, define their needs and purposes. This will allow you to create an abstract that will perfectly fit the audience’s needs and answers their questions. After that, you are supposed to define what type of abstract you are going to create.
Taking all of these aspects into consideration will help you to complete exactly that kind of abstract that you are supposed to. You need to be confident that you understand all of the preparation steps and after that, you can start writing your abstract.
Step-by-step instruction to writing an assignment abstract
The process of creating an abstract to the assignment could be subdivided into concrete steps in order to make it more understandable and easier.
- Define the purpose. Undoubtedly, the main reason why you are writing this paper is that your instructor gave you such a task. But think deeper and define what the purpose of your paper is. Why does it make a point? Explain to your audience what makes your assignment so important and worth to be read.
- Give an explanation to the problem. You are supposed to picture the specific issue that your paper addresses to. Describe the main problem that is discussed in your paper and try to explain what you wanted to solve. Is it general or specific? Try to include the main argument to let you readers understand better the problem.
- Give an explanation of the methods. In this step, you need to explain in what way you discovered the problem and with the help of what methods you solved it. Include a description of your own work supporting with evidence.
- Give the description of the results. This step refers only to the informative style of an abstract. You are supposed to place here the results of your research. Show your audience what you have found while completing research. Explain how your arguments were proved and what answers your questions have found. Summarize the general result of the whole paper.
- Give the conclusion. This step finishes your abstract and is supposed to give it some completeness. You need to sum up what is the meaning of all your findings and why your paper has importance.
6.Format the abstract. Formatting is extremely important as it considerably influences the quality of your abstract. Be confident that all of the parts are accurately structured and logically follow each other. Do not forget to write it separately from the paper.
7.Polish and edit. After having completed your abstract, you need to reread it once more and polish. Writing in a hurry, you might make some grammar or spelling mistakes that will lessen the quality of your paper. Improve everything to make your abstract absolutely perfect.