Page 255 - English for Writing Research Papers

240

3. Use the background information (which the reader may or not already know) to
justify what you did, and outline your methodology (and materials where
appropriate)
4. Provide some more information on your results
5. Tell the reader the implications of your results

13.24 I am a historian. We don't necessarily get 'results'

or follow a specific methodology. What should I do?
If you analyze history abstracts, and other abstracts from humanistic disciplines,
they still have a structure that is similar to a scientifi c abstract.
You have a primary objective (e.g. a theory or perspective that you would like to
share, test, analyze or question), a design to your research, some methods and pro-
cedures that you used, some outcomes from your research that support your theory/
perspective, and some conclusions or implications derived from these outcomes.

Abstracts from social and behavioral sciences tend to devote more space to back-
ground issues and context setting. The 'thesis' is often formulated as a series of
questions that inform the reader about what issues will be dealt with in the paper.

In any case your abstract should include the following:

• background information

• your aim and its importance

• your contribution and its value

• what you looked at
• your conclusions and implications

Here is a fictitious abstract from a researcher interested in the history and evolution
of languages.

(1) The Quaker movement was founded in the mid 17th century by George Fox. One of the
practices used by this rebellious religious group was the use of 'plain speech' and 'simplicity'.
This involved addressing all people with the same second person pronoun, in the words of Fox:
'without any respect to rich or poor, great or small'. The modern use of 'you' in the English
language (in 10th century England there were 12 forms of 'you') is thus attributed to Fox's
egalitarian movement. (2) Was this use of 'you' for addressing all kinds of people, regardless of
their social status, specifically initiated by Fox? Or was it simply a part of an organic unplanned