Writing Abstracts in the Arts & Humanities
Training Organisation: Lucian Consulting
Delivery: In Person
Programme Description:
This workshop is a one-day intensive training session on writing research abstracts - a key form of scholarly communication. Essential for conferences and journal articles, abstracts are of critical importance for raising the profile of your research and developing an academic career. The workshop is designed to develop the necessary skills, encouraging participants to find clear, concise and powerful ways to summarize their research and make an impact.
At the outset, participants are encouraged in a group brainstorming exercise to think through the full range of contexts and functions for abstracts in academic life in order to understand the genre. Building on this, they are invited to reflect on their own expectations for what an abstract should deliver in order to work effectively in different contexts, whether as a tool for selection and evaluation, categorisation, indexing or sorting for relevance, a time-saving executive summary, or a means of drawing in a potential audience and readership.
With this groundwork in place, participants are given a structured framework for writing an abstract and taken step-by-step through the process of drafting in a quickfire writing exercise. This is an intensive way to produce a first draft efficiently, which is then subject to two further rounds of editing, including a mutual feedback exercise in which participants work in pairs, acting as test readers for each other's abstract. The process includes tailoring to the context and choosing keywords.
Learning Outcomes:
- A full understanding of the different types of abstracts required in a range of contexts including conferences, journals, books, theses, reports, funding proposals, websites and lecture synopses.
- A user's perspective on what is required to fulfil these functions effectively
- The ability to draft a structured abstract efficiently under timed conditions using a framework of key elements
- Techniques to summarise a research project concisely and powerfully
- The ability to edit the first draft and tailor to the context
- An understanding of keywords and how to choose them