Imagine summing up all your life's work and experience in a single paper. This is the work that goes into writing a dissertation. These papers are the culmination of years of study, research and experience, and nearly every higher-education program requires some form of a dissertation before bestowing a degree. Dissertations generally begin with abstracts, or summaries that preview the information from the main paper. Composing an accurate and interesting summary can make the difference between a fascinated reader and just another bored professor.
Suggestions
Compose most, if not all, of your dissertation before you begin the summary. Review the dissertation with the intention of writing an abstract. This will help you pick out the most vital and interesting parts that will grab your reader's interest.
Pre-write the abstract, focusing on listing your thesis topic or purpose, your research methods and the general results and conclusions you drew from the research discussed in your dissertation. This early stage can simply be notes that you take as you read your dissertation, or can consist of full sentences or paragraphs that you can use in your introduction.
Avoid using direct references to your research in the introduction. While you are required to use such references in the rest of the paper, the abstract should only be used to state your ideas and conclusions. Using references will make the abstract too long, and the reader may get lost in too much information up front.
Revise your prewriting. Put all the information into grammatically correct sentences with proper spelling.
Re-read your abstract and make any further adjustments. Check that the organization is logical. In general, the information in the summary should follow the path of the research, starting with the thesis and ending with the conclusions.
Ask a friend, professor or someone familiar with your research to read your summary. A new set of eyes may be able to catch spelling and grammar mistakes or organizational errors that could ruin your abstract.
Tips
In general, an abstract summary is less than 10 percent as long as your full dissertation. While longer papers may have a one- to two-page abstract, most summaries are only a paragraph or so.
A summary should never provide any new information; it simply summarizes the work from your dissertation.
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