 Today, I am going to take a very brief session on summary writing. So, summarizing your work for two different audience. One is a pure abstract, which is an abstract which goes part of your report, which goes part of your thesis or a journal article. That abstract is for a technical audience who are your peers. They are peers, so they know broadly at least they are science educated or they are in your discipline, your department discipline. That is one group. The second group is general audience. So, science writing for general audience. These are the two topics I am going to take quickly now. So, summarizing technical. So, why is abstract important? You all know because abstract is one thing which is read after the title and abstract is free. All the abstracts are free to be downloaded. So, if you have to capture an audience or if you have to get your abstract up in a search engine, you have to be clearly conveying what the message is. So, somebody reads it, they should feel the need to download the paper and read it in detail. So, an abstract is in short a complete paper written in a short form. Complete paper. I will tell you why complete it is. So, just as we said yesterday that you have to write two iterations of the introduction one for yourself and one for the actual audience. Abstract also you write twice. One as a guiding draft for yourself. So, abstract that you write will actually be a shortened paper. I will show you how it will be a shortened paper and then finally for the readers. How does abstract? So, this is the structure of the paper which we saw before. A paper begins with an introduction, the background, then there is a problem, then the results and discussion, then then conclusions. This is the overall paper that is what it contains. Correct? An abstract should contain almost all of this. A general abstract should contain almost all of this except they are just in one line or two lines. For example, it could be one or two sentences of the introduction or to the field. So, this line when you say it is a basic introduction, it means that anybody who has a reasonable knowledge in science or engineering should be able to understand. Anybody like for example, I will take an example here. There are people from electrical, mechanical, basic sciences and humanities. Now, if you all of them are educated in science at least up to school level and most of them are in their undergraduate also they have taken science. So, the first opening line should be understandable by this audience. So, that is this broad picture that I have shown. So, begin with any scientist or engineer can understand. Then two or three lines which is expanding on that introduction, somebody in your department can understand. It is not everybody in your college, but somebody in electrical department. You are in electrical, somebody in electrical department should understand. So, that comes a little bit background, detailed background. After that in one statement state the problem which is the question. What is the question you are addressing? You have given the background information. What is the question that you are addressing in one line? This line may not be understood by everybody not necessarily people in your department. Mostly people in your area that particular area only will be able to understand. So, that becomes a specific question that you are addressing in that topic. It should not be general or anybody should understand no. That should be understood and appreciated only by the person in that discipline. Then one line following it the answer the question and an answer. What is the main result that you got which answers the question you started off with? That is all. This core thing is just one center. The center part is just the problem and the result is one of them. Then comes expansion of the result. So, you started off wide and narrowed down to the problem. It is like started off with your university, came to your department, came to a specific area that is the problem. You found the result. Then you have to expand back in a similar way. What does this result imply? What was expected previously that made this result different? Did you expect something else? Did people expect something else that made it different? That is one thing and then expanded to something which in a general context. So, what does it imply to your department? That is your discipline. What does that result imply to your discipline? The last sentence is what does it imply to general science? You start with general science, department, specific area, result, department, general science. This is how an abstract is also structured. So, this is taken from the magazine, science magazine nature which has got this specs. I have slightly modified it to expand because nature is again little bit specific. It is not very general. So, I have just slightly modified that. So, but by and large it is that. One suggested activity which we will do later is we will share some material with you. In that material we will ask you, I mean ask the participants to identify which is the introduction statement, which is the problem, which is the result, what is the implication and so on. So, we will give some of these things and ask the people to identify. So, maybe we will have 2 or 3 papers so that you can distribute to different people from different disciplines and they can identify that. The other detail assignment that we will give is ask them to read a paper. So, since now we are dealing with mature people who are already done their PhD or doing the PhD, they will be able to appreciate what a journal article is. They will read any journal article and then ask them to rewrite the abstract. That is one activity we will do. But how do you use this for your students, particularly the undergraduate students? What you should do is you give them simple articles in which they understand. There may be simple detailed research articles like articles that come in popular science magazines. In India we have the sadhana, you have current science. Current science is little heavy, but sadhana and similar magazines have articles which is a resonance for example. All these things have articles which is understood by even undergraduate students. So, you can ask them to rewrite. So, this reading a paper and rewriting the abstract will actually help them to rewrite in this structure, the structure which I showed. So, this will actually help them to write the abstract for any work they are doing. So, this is some exercise which we will do in December. Synopsis has to be submitted before you are submitting the... Yes. Yes. So, are you including that particular part in some... No, so synopsis again... In some cases it is called as a summary. Correct. In some cases it is called as a synopsis. So, synopsis we not had dealing separately because it is extended of whatever I told you now. It is instead of having one or two lines you have few paragraphs of all of those things. They have to expect it to write down chapter wise, what are the chapter... Correct. Your PhD thesis. So, that is why I am expecting what is to be written when you are expecting that chapter wise you have to write summary. Then what is to be written? Right, the answer to your question is no, we do not, we are not doing it in this course because we thought we should not specifically target only research audience. Some of the things which I told is applicable to both research as well as people who are writing normal project reports. Even project reports need a summary. Then project reports need a proper organizing of matter. Synopsis, extended abstract, all these things is usually only for research audience and we did not want to specifically target only them. Although you are right that it is important for them. Okay, so do you want to take quick questions on this abstract writing anything? If we give an exercise for abstract writing, I provided some model to them. If you ask them to rewrite what will they do already it is very good. No, no, so there are two levels. The first thing is that the exercise which we will give them because when they are doing it for the first time, even identifying which line corresponds to an introduction, which is a problem statement, which is a result, which is an implication is not easy for the first time people. The best level we can ask them to identify these things. And then when I am asking them to rewrite I am not going to do it for something abstract is already well written. Something in which it is not so well written and not all abstracts need to follow this. Very specific journals they will not have the general broad introduction. They will already start at the problem statement. They need not start at the broad as I said institute wide, department wise and so on. So some of them will directly start at the problem statement. So if you take articles like that and ask them to read and rewrite, but ask them to rewrite as though they are doing the whole thing. So that will definitely be your exercise which they cannot simply copy from the existing abstract. So will you be giving or me ask you something? We will suggest one or two from our side. It will be nice if you can find out something because you will know ultimately who are the people who are coming. Suppose in your area there are only people who are coming only in English literature. So maybe the what we give may not be so interesting. We will try to find maybe one from, we will give one from humanities, one from as I did this time. One from humanities, one from electrical sciences, one from mechanical sciences. Mechanical and basic sciences one, electrical one and maybe biological sciences one. So we will have four articles which we will be using throughout for different exercises. Yeah, so keywords as I said I stressed yesterday but I did not have a lot of time to elaborate on that. In the detail lecture I will be elaborating on the keywords part that it has to be, the keywords has to come in the abstract, it has to come in the introduction, title everywhere consistently. This is what I point I made yesterday.