A Small Writing Guide

In everyday language, the word abstract may be confused with a summary. However, an abstract is usually always a text written by the author himself, unlike a summary. Abstracts can be found, for example, in the ingress of articles, textbooks, and theses. Instructions for writing an abstract for theses are given separately.

An abstract is a type of text in which spoken or written text is explained in abbreviated form. A clean abstract means that it contains only the original text or the source text in condensed form. A commentary abstract includes the author's questions, comments, thoughts and opinions. A commentary abstract can also contain several texts. (Tarkoma & Vuorijärvi 2012, 140–143.)

An abstract can be written, for example, from an entire book, article, lecture or seminar. What is essential in writing an abstract is that the author understands the text he or she has read or heard. For this reason, good notes on the lecture or text read are necessary.

The author must be able to extract essential and significant things from the text. This preserves the meaning of the text. If the author picks up things that are irrelevant to the paper at random, the reader will not understand the paper. The reader's understanding is supported by, for example, time and place, progress from a familiar issue to a new one, and vocabulary appropriate to the topic. Writing an abstract requires compaction and has to be relevant to the source material.

In an abstract the order in which things are presented, sentence structures, and parsing are often different from the original text. A good tool for the author of the abstract is to extract from the text first the main concept and then the related meanings. These may include concept definitions, time, and definitions. (Kauppinen 1988.)

If the assignment is an abstract, you should make sure that you have a ready-made model. Be sure to follow the instructions on the abstract's format.

Here's how to write an abstract:

1. Find out what the purpose and genre of the original text is (informing, influencing, entertaining), author, time and place of publication.
2. Read the text first by eye, then verbatim. Make notes / mind maps in your own words
3. Find the main content of the text. What is the idea of ​​the text, what are the essentials? What are the main concepts, sub-concepts and relationships between things?
4. Create a self-contained, complete body of text. Mark the source information at the beginning or end of your paper. Write the topic of the paper at the beginning (for example Jim Johnson deals with... the title and year of the article...). Refers to the original text where appropriate. Remember that the reader has no background information. You can change the order and structure. Create your own subheadings if necessary. Use direct quotes carefully. The aim is to explain the core information of the original text to the reader.
5. Finally, check the text. Is the content the same as in the original text? What about key concepts and text style? Do the introduction, development and summary form a coherent whole? Do the transitions from one paragraph to another make sense? Are the sentence structures clear and unambiguous? Perform text and language maintenance. Check spelling and sentence structures. (Lemmetyinen 2010.)

Layout of the paper

Use a template for written assignments unless instructed otherwise.