The abstract: What you should know before you sit down to write a paper

An abstract is written independent work, which sooner or later one has to write to all students and researchers. In order to write a work that best meets the methodological and research objectives, it is necessary to choose the appropriate type of work. In the course of the educational activity, students mainly write essays, reports, and abstracts. Abstract and compilation relate more to scientific activity.

There is a general and particular definition of annotation as a kind of abstract. In a broad sense, the abstract is a brief summary of the source, in a narrow sense, a brief description of the content. The evaluation component is certainly present in any annotation and serves its purposes.

Annotating the source, it is necessary to determine to which audience the author addresses (a wide circle of readers, narrow specialists, people who are just beginning to study an object or possess an advanced level of knowledge, etc.). (1)

The method of annotation is widely used when writing the abstracts of dissertations and methodological sections of the thesis or even online essay writings, in which an overview of the literature is given. In fact, the abstract becomes a secondary document in relation to the primary student documents, which are diploma and final qualification papers.

Abstract - the extremely laconic kind of work. It is necessary in several sentences to convey the content of the source and give its evaluation. To simplify the writing of annotations, you can refer to the output of the book, the textbook and the monograph. Articles in scientific collections also have annotations. The situation is more complicated with newspaper and magazine publications, Internet sources should be referred to in legal works. In this case, only self-annotating will help, according to the rules set out below.

The abstract- annotation

Writing an abstract annotation is possible only after full familiarization with the source; otherwise there is a danger to miss important points, such as the author's general creative intent, reference group (audience), genre, etc.

Specific requirements are set for this type of abstract, namely: conciseness, logical structure, conformity to the scientific style of presentation (use of impersonal constructions, the accuracy of the translation (if the annotation is made in a foreign language), use of unified (conventional) abbreviations and abbreviations, unity of terms and terminology. Annotations in addition to their informative nature can perform a recommendation and evaluation function.

In the assessment annotation, there is always a critical or analytical component, expressed in determining the theoretical and practical significance of the source, as well as the level of its novelty. The evaluation itself can be built taking into account the comparative approach, critical rethinking or a combination of the two methods.

Recommendation annotation is a fairly specialized document, which gives recommendations on the use of the basic ideas of the source in theoretical (scientific) research and practical activities. It has a more precise character; its writing activity is based on the synthesis of all parts of the source, bringing the disparate postulates to a common denominator. (2)