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How To Write Dissertation Abstracts

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Dissertation Abstracts

When you are writing a dissertation, you will divide the write-up into many different parts. A compulsory part of every dissertation is the abstract. Many people view the dissertation abstracts as one of the major parts of the entire dissertation, and therefore you must learn how to write it the same way you learn how to write a speech.

The abstract is meant to contain a summary or an overview of the entire dissertation and the conclusion reached at the end of the work. In fact, your abstract must serve as bait to the readers. The major thing about an abstract is that it gives the reader a general idea of what to expect in the main paper. It is majorly centered on getting the reader to make a decision on whether to read on or not.

So, for you to elicit this interest to go ahead with the entire paper, your dissertation abstracts must work on the psyche of the reader to give him just a tip of the iceberg, while inventing him to come in and get the real thing. This is always observed even when I allow the writing service providers to write my assignment for me.

What Readers Expect From A Dissertation Abstract

Despite being just 150 to 350 words long (in most cases), the Abstract is arguably one of the most important parts of your dissertation. In this short space, the abstract must capture the essence of your dissertation. This includes the problem being tackled (and the motivation behind this), the significance of your research, the research strategy guiding it, as well as the major findings and conclusions. The perfect informative abstract is one where the reader could choose not to read on but would still understand the essence of your dissertation. At the same time, a poorly constructed dissertation abstract can mislead the reader into thinking the study is about something it is not, confusing them from the very start.
In most cases, you will be expected to use an informative, rather than descriptive style, when writing your dissertation abstract.

The dissertation abstract needs to be well structured because you have such a short word count to communicate so much about your dissertation. Typically, the dissertation abstract contains a number of basic structural components. These include:

  1. The problem being addressed/the rationale for the research.
  2. The significance of the study.
  3. The key theories underpinning the dissertation.
  4. The components of your research strategy that you adopted.
  5. The main results/findings.
  6. The principal conclusions.

Not all of these structural components are always used. It will depend on the type of dissertation you are writing. However, each component aims to help you summarise the core aspects of your dissertation, from the problem being addressed and the significance of your study, which are communicated in Chapter One: Introduction, through to the research strategy guiding the research (Chapter Three: Research Strategy), and eventually, the conclusion and/or recommendations sections (Chapter Five: Discussion/Conclusion).

How To Structure Your Dissertation Abstract

Abstracts written for undergraduate and master's level dissertations have a number of structural components. Even though every dissertation is different, these structural components are likely to be relevant for most dissertations. When writing the dissertation abstract, the most important thing to remember is why your research was significant. This should have been clearly explained in the introductory chapter of your dissertation (Chapter One: Introduction). Understanding the significance of your research is important because how much you write for each component of the abstract (in terms of word count or number of sentences) will depend on the relative importance of each of these components to your research.

There are four major structural components, which aim to let the reader know about the background to and significance of your study, the research strategy being followed, the findings of the research, and the conclusions that were made. You should write one or a number of sentences for each of these components, with each making up a part of the 150 to 350 words that are typically written in dissertation abstracts.

The position of abstracts

The outline of every dissertation is the same and so every 5th grade book report must have the abstract positioned after the title of the dissertation. Now, while the majority of the abstracts written in dissertations comes into the dissertation precisely at the beginning parts, there may be cases where you are demanded to write a separate abstract that comes as a separate work. For instance, when you are following a specific chemistry lab report format, you may realize that your professor prefers an abstract that is separate from the entire report.

The general and standard international size for dissertation abstracts states that it is not supposed to be more than 150 words for the master’s thesis and 350 words for the doctoral thesis. For the maintenance of style and structure, you are always advised to insure that your abstracts is contained in 1 double spaced page. Don’t allow this to be more than 1 page.

  1. There are areas you must pay attention to in the dissertation abstracts.
  2. The research questions will form the elements upon which other parts of the abstract draw their meaning, so you have to outline them.
  3. The research questions must come in the early part of the abstract.
  4. Remember that you can only make up to three questions in a logical and coherent abstract.
  5. When you have more than three questions, then you should choose three most substantive ones.

The results in the abstract must be given clearly. Many of the readers don’t want to know about what you did, they just want to hear what you achieved at the end and you must not deny them this in clear terms. The methodology used to arrive at this only authenticates your claims and you must present them, while your summary must be geared at interpreting your results so that the laymen can grab them. It involves giving concrete evidences.

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The core points of the abstracts

You must realize that the abstracts international are meant to be used, and the usability is centered on the content. For instance, a physician assistant personal statement will go with the medical community approved 7 sentence structure. This is how different fields have their approved structures for this. What it entails is that you should know the structure approved in your field before you write, though, all must come with the same outline.

One thing you must look out for is the fact that your abstracts international must state a problem which it is out to solve. It is not an issue that comes from the wind. You must solve a specific problem with it and this will lure people to read. Again, good abstracts must recognize your partners or participants. Though some fields will demand that you leave their identities confidential, you should use a general term to define and acknowledge the type of participants used.

When writing the results and conclusion, you should know that they are the most important part, so you may want to assign more room for these. In fact, the question sentence, which explains your methodology and the results and conclusion sentences, should have the biggest spaces. If you are doing a 7-sentence structure, you can allot two sentences each to these two parts while others should get one.

Examples of Dissertation Abstracts

Topic: “Analysis of the Application of Smart Technologies in the Healthcare Industry to Improve Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction: An Investigation of Smart Hospitals in Kerala state, India”

“The healthcare industry is rapidly changing with the advent of technology. The traditional medical practice has lost its productivity with the ever increasing population. The IoT revolution is fast paced and has provided a wide variety of smart health applications in the global market. A smart hospital uses data and AI to enhance the work of the healthcare providers and administrators. They can also provide services that are consistent and high-quality to the welfare of the patients. In order to gain a competitive advantage in the market, healthcare institutes must improve their service quality and customer satisfaction. Kerala state is reported to have one of the best health systems in India. This study compare the various factors that influence the service quality and customer satisfaction in relation to Smart Healthcare in Kerala. A survey analysis was done to study the customer satisfaction to various smart health provisions in the hospitals across the state. The findings from the study states that service quality and patient satisfaction are correlated. The study also confirms that the patients are aware of the various smart health provisions in the market and are willing to adapt them. Furthermore directions for future research in this aspect are suggested.”


Topic: “Knowing and Being Known: Sexual Delinquency, Stardom, and Adolescent Girlhood in Midcentury American Film”

“Sexual delinquency marked midcentury cinematic representations of adolescent girls in 1940s, 50, and early 60s. Drawing from the history of adolescence and the context of midcentury female juvenile delinquency, I argue that studios and teen girl stars struggled for decades with publicity, censorship, and social expectations regarding the sexual license of teenage girls. Until the late 1950s, exploitation films and B movies exploited teen sex and pregnancy while mainstream Hollywood ignored those issues, struggling to promote teen girl stars by tightly controlling their private lives but depriving fan magazines of the gossip and scandals that normally fueled the machinery of stardom. The emergence and image of the postwar, sexually autonomous teen girl finally began to see expression in mainstream melodramas of the late 50s, and teen girl stars such as Sandra Dee and Natalie Wood created new, “post-delinquent” star images wherein “good girls” could still be sexually experienced. This new image was a significant departure from the widespread belief that the sexually active teen girl was a fundamentally delinquent threat to the nuclear family, and offered a liberal counterpoint to more conservative teen girl prototypes like Hayley Mills, which continued to have cultural currency.”


Topic: “Image/Text and Text/Image: Reimagining Multimodal Relationships through Dissociation”

“W.J.T. Mitchell has famously noted that we are in the midst of a “pictorial turn,” and images are playing an increasingly important role in digital and multimodal communication. My dissertation addresses the question of how meaning is made when texts and images are united in multimodal arguments. Visual rhetoricians have often attempted to understand text-image arguments by privileging one medium over the other, either using text-based rhetorical principles or developing new image-based theories. I argue that the relationship between the two media is more dynamic, and can be better understood by applying The New Rhetoric’s concept of dissociation, which Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca developed to demonstrate how the interaction of differently valued concepts can construct new meaning. My dissertation expands the range of dissociation by applying it specifically to visual contexts and using it to critique visual arguments in a series of historical moments when political, religious, and economic factors cause one form of media to be valued over the other: Byzantine Iconoclasm, the late medieval period, the 1950’s advertising boom, and the modern digital age. In each of these periods, I argue that dissociation reveals how the privileged medium can shape an entire multimodal argument. I conclude with a discussion of dissociative multimodal pedagogy, applying dissociation to the multimodal composition classroom.”

You can access other sample dissertation abstracts in our sample dissertations, click here for a peek!



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