Timeline for Is it wrong to start your abstract with a question?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
22 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 26, 2017 at 15:53 | comment | added | Noah Snyder | I’d certainly prefer the second example. Short, simple, and to the point, like an abstract should be. | |
| Nov 26, 2017 at 9:15 | comment | added | Ink blot | @chessofnerd: Micro-optimization is good, but this is ridiculous. | |
| Nov 26, 2017 at 8:22 | comment | added | chessofnerd | The two abstracts contain the same content but the first is almost twice as long. Why one would want to take twice as much of my time to say the same thing in a formal research publication is beyond me. | |
| S Nov 24, 2017 at 14:49 | history | suggested | Neil G | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Fixed grammar. Avoid "can and should" legalese.
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| Nov 24, 2017 at 7:56 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Nov 24, 2017 at 14:49 | |||||
| Nov 24, 2017 at 5:16 | vote | accept | John Smith | ||
| Nov 24, 2017 at 5:15 | vote | accept | John Smith | ||
| Nov 24, 2017 at 5:15 | |||||
| Nov 23, 2017 at 21:41 | comment | added | Ink blot | @JollyJoker: "Does posting weird comments on SE promote procrastination? The answer will be written in a future paper..." | |
| Nov 23, 2017 at 13:19 | comment | added | JollyJoker | @JiK My thoughts exactly. "Does every compact Hausdorff space admit a compatible metric? The answer will surprise you!" | |
| Nov 23, 2017 at 12:16 | comment | added | Ink blot | @JiK: Not quite. But a little bit of clickbaiting, yeah. And I think it's not necessary a bad thing, if done in the right amount, and when there is content and context to justify that. Which may or may not be tricky to achieve, depending on many different variables. But nonetheless, I feel that if you can present something with a little bit of humor, it is likely to come across much better, and it will be inviting. Also, don't forget there are two kind of "paper readings", there is "I need these results" and "this seems interesting...", in the latter case, the abstract is an invitation. | |
| Nov 23, 2017 at 10:19 | comment | added | JiK | Of your examples, the first abstract feels much better. This answer seems to promote clickbaity abstracts. Abstracts should not invite you to read it, abstracts should tell what the paper is about so that you have enough information to make the decision whether to read it. | |
| Nov 22, 2017 at 22:57 | history | edited | Ink blot | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Apparently it does not mean what I think it means.
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| Nov 22, 2017 at 21:42 | comment | added | Ink blot | @Robert: I am not a native English speaker, but from what I managed to gather so far, a mathematical paper is "prosaic" if it has a lot of non-mathematical explanations and handwaving discussion around the dry definition/theorem/proof structure. | |
| Nov 22, 2017 at 21:41 | comment | added | Ink blot | @J...: On the other hand, I was working with a friend on some project, and I suggested a title which was totally fluff, but would have totally caused people to be at least intrigued enough to read the abstract; whereas he offered a title that was... just wry and godawful to my taste. The project seemed to have died off with one very nice unpublished result, so the discussion is now moot... but oh well. | |
| Nov 22, 2017 at 20:32 | comment | added | Robert Furber | @Inkblot I was a little confused by your answer because of the way you use "prosaic". But I think I have found the problem. As you can see here: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prosaic prosaic means commonplace and is the opposite of poetic. Therefore your second example is the one that is prosaic. However, your confusion is not a new one, because Molière already put a comedic turn on it by having the title character of "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" discover, to his astonishment, that he had been speaking in prose his whole life. | |
| Nov 22, 2017 at 20:20 | comment | added | aeismail | There is a "cultural" bias in titles of papers across disciplines. In biology and medicine, the conclusion is usually included in the title, not just the abstract. In the physical sciences, the title is usually shorter. In the humanities, something of the form "Title: Subtitle" tends to be the norm. | |
| Nov 22, 2017 at 18:00 | comment | added | J... | Maybe I'm just getting too old, but the opening question gives the whole thing a feeling of cheap veneer of the popular science style documentary sort. It's as though the author is imagining themselves as Marcus du Sautoy or Jim Al-Khalili. It feels rather patronizing, to be honest. If I'm reading an abstract it's because my time is short and I want to determine whether or not to read the whole thing - I don't want to wade through fluff and showmanship. | |
| Nov 22, 2017 at 14:43 | comment | added | Ink blot | Okay, yeah, with that I agree. I'm just a bit allergic to people who say these things, often without distinguishing between people who argue for syntactic simplicity (or at least, readability) and people who argue for semantic simplicity (which I think is literally impossible, since after all one has to spend many years obtaining a Ph.D., if it were easy to explain, maybe only a few weeks would have been enough). | |
| Nov 22, 2017 at 14:26 | comment | added | CodeMonkey | Explaining something simply doesn't mean that everyone will understand it. It means that for a complex topic you don't add any unnecessary complexity. A lot of simple writing can be completely decoupled from the contents. Simple writing means: 1. Avoiding long convoluted sentences. 2. Not unnecessarily using archaic or "educated" sounding terminology. 3. Explaining special notation. 4. Not using the passive voice to sound more formal. BTW people that want to seem smart often produce the opposite impression | |
| Nov 22, 2017 at 13:55 | comment | added | Ink blot | I formally protest these "buzz claims". If I thought that my thesis project could have been simplifed, I would have made more effort in doing so. But unfortunately, short of developing a new mathematical tool (which in itself is a complicated task) and writing a complicated paper about how to use that tool for that project, I'm afraid I don't know how this can be done. Of course, I did try to give ample explanation and intuition at every step of the way, as well as why other ideas I considered failed or were more difficult to pursue. But that does not make the work itself simple in any way. | |
| Nov 22, 2017 at 13:03 | comment | added | CodeMonkey | +1 for "Papers should be something that is read by people.". Too many authors try to sound so smart that reading their paper becomes cumbersome. I like the Da Vinci mantra: "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." or as Einstein put it in teaching terms "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough". | |
| Nov 22, 2017 at 10:25 | history | answered | Ink blot | CC BY-SA 3.0 |