You may think that 'writing the abstract' simply involves summarising your work and believe there is little more to it. But not all abstracts are created equal. Writing abstracts that are technically sound is relatively easy; writing amazing abstracts is not as straightforward. Many philosophers across history have commented on the art of brevity. Mark Twain, Voltaire, Blaise Pascal, Winston Churchill, Cicero, and Benjamin Franklin have all, in one place or another, been claimed to have noted, "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." Some of the attributions are clearly spurious, but several are supported by solid evidence and underline the observation by our august peers that being succinct takes effort [1].
As with the above authors, you need to think about what posterity might think of your contribution to science when writing your abstract. It is very possible that your brief summary will remain findable and available for reading long after your symposia posters have been forgotten and your beautifully constructed manuscript has been buried by time. Internet search engines, online databases, and ready retrieval systems mean that anyone can (and will) find and read your abstract [2]. Manuscript abstracts, for example, will continue to emerge from carefully constructed and broadly executed search strategies for decades to come—perhaps even longer. As such, they will form a major aspect of your scientific legacy, available for scrutiny and comparison long after you have stopped active research (and possibly even active breathing) [3].
In our latest Insider's insight, we hope to convince you that an abstract is not simply a short, standalone, easy-to-follow overview of your work [4]. A well-written abstract facilitates understanding of the main thrust of your research and allows readers to decide quickly whether they want to include your work in their upcoming congress [5]. As William Shakespeare's character Polonius notes in the play Hamlet, "Brevity is the soul of wit," where 'wit' referred not so much to humour but more to intelligence [6]. Perhaps ironically, Hamlet was Shakespeare's longest play. Follow our guidance, and hopefully, your past work will not return to haunt you with regret like Hamlet's ghost. Our advice is not only for those young scientists to whom the task of drafting the abstract is often allocated. When you share your work with your colleagues and peers, it will likely inspire much critical scrutiny and misinterpretation, be careful not to let their edits, additions, and modifications dilute the abstract's message. We would also want to avoid complex philosophical and ethical issues or feelings of cold-blooded murder, calculated revenge, and thwarted desire!
If you are still wondering just who is recorded as first observing that shorter letters take longer to write, the answer is the French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal [1][7][8]. The statement appeared in a letter in a collection called Lettres Provinciales in the year 1657: "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." A rough 'modern' translation might read: "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter," where the term "this" refers to the letter itself. An English translation was created in 1658 and published in London, attracting much comment and attention; the rest, they say, is history!
References
- Keyes R. The Quote Verifier. New York: St Martin's Griffin; 2006. p. 119-120.
- Bollacker KD, Lawrence S, Giles CL. CiteSeer: an autonomous Web agent for automatic retrieval and identification of interesting publications. In: Proceedings of the second international conference on Autonomous agents; 1998 May 9-13; Minneapolis, MN, USA..
- Swales JM, Feak CB. Abstracts and the Writing of Abstracts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press; 2009. (Michigan Series in English for Academic & Professional Purposes).
- An Insider's Insight into Amazing Abstracts. Niche Science & Technology Ltd., 2017
- Day RA, Gastel B. How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper. 6th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2006.
- Freud S. Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Moffat, Yard & Co; 1916. p. 25.
- Shapiro FR. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press; 2006. p. 583.
- Knowles E, editor. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. 7th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2009. Section: Blaise Pascal.
