The abstract is part of the preliminary stages of a thesis. Most probably, it is placed at the start of the thesis as it is the substantive description and overview of your work. This overview helps readers to set accurate expectations and know whether a given body of literature is relevant or worth noting. Many of us called the dissertation abstract a brief summary of its five chapters. Stated in another way, the extract of a research work highlighting all its important points in highly condensed form is called a dissertation abstract.
The most important thing about an abstract is that it can stand alone; in other words, even without the aid of the whole dissertation, abstract can alone tell the reader about the research story. Additionally, the literature review can also stand- alone, but it still requires us to cite each source properly. However, the abstract never requires any supporting sources; rather, it only highlights what has been done and how to achieve the desired outcomes.
When To Write A Dissertation Abstract?
Writing an abstract is the toughest task only if you attempt to write it at the beginning of a research plan. Proper word selection, sentence structure, filtering material to condense the large dataset, and finding ways to write it in as precise form as possible are all difficult if an abstract is written at the start of dissertation writing. However, the process becomes at least 10 X easier when you attempt it after completing the whole writing process. Most probably, after writing almost 10,000 to 20,000 words for a dissertation, writing only 250-300 words abstract becomes a piece of cake. However, it is pretty fair to write it in the end and place it at the start of the dissertation. This is a trick to smoothly bypass all unnecessary obstacles in writing an abstract. Still, this is not a hard and fast rule for when to write an abstract, it is solely upon a writer’s choice to make a final decision.
Five Components Of The Dissertation Abstract:
As described above, the abstract is the summary of a whole dissertation, and a dissertation has five chapters, so to summarise all these chapters abstract is divided into five components. Each component of an abstract directly refers to each chapter of the dissertation. Thus, the names of the five components of the dissertation abstract are:
- Introduction:
- Significance:
- Methods:
- Findings:
- Conclusion and future outcomes:
Important Phrases That Can Help Make Your Dissertation Abstract Perfect:
Apart from all these, students must also need to be very careful about selecting words and phrases for writing a dissertation abstract. Basically, while writing a task with a limited word count, the selection of words is more important as you have to summarise the whole dissertation without being descriptive. Simply, the better the phrases to make your dissertation abstract, the more eye-catching, appealing, and precise it will be. Thus, the following are some important phrases that you must use while writing an abstract:
Opening phrases for abstracts:
- X is a fundamental problem
- X plays an important role in
- X is exponentially affecting the mass
- It is of uttermost importance to suggest some worth- noting to solving X
Phrases for signifying the importance:
- Q is a key factor affecting the R
- Fundamental research on Q was first started in the 1990’s
- Central to the whole discipline, Q is affecting human lives badly
- It is the need of the hour to pay critical attention to the issues of Q
Phrases for referring to the methodology:
- The design of the study was….
- The descriptive study was conducted by collecting data from….
- A holistic approach was utilised to see the effect of Q on R by collecting data….
- The study design was comparative as the participants were randomly categorised into four different groups, namely……
Phrases for summarising the findings:
- One interesting finding is…..
- As a result……..
- In consequences…….
- The most important critical finding of the current study was…….
Concluding phrases for results:
- The experiment has confirmed that……..
- Results indicated no significant different between the ………
- After all, is said and done, the study can be summarised as…….
- In a nutshell, the research needs further investigation before being implemented in the local step-up….
Final Thoughts:
Dissertation abstract writing seems easy to those who have written a complete thesis on their own. But for those who really don’t know what’s inside their dissertation, writing an abstract is really a big problem. However, in either case, the above-mentioned phrases for different components of the abstract can help you increase the quality of your work many folds.
