TITLE: The Power of a Good Abstract
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 28, 2013 2:52 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
Someone tweeted a link to
Philip Greenspun's M.S. thesis
yesterday. This is how you grab your reader's attention:
A revolution in earthmoving, a $100 billion industry, can be
achieved with three components: the GPS location system, sensors
and computers in earthmoving vehicles, and SITE CONTROLLER, a
central computer system that maintains design data and directs
operations. The first two components are widely available; I
built SITE CONTROLLER to complete the triangle and describe it
here.
Now I have to read the rest of the thesis.
You could do worse than use Greenspun's first two sentences as
a template for your next abstract:
A revolution in <major industry or research area>
can be achieved with <n> components:
<component-1>, <component-2>, ...
and <component-n>. The first <n-1>
components are widely available. I built <program
name> to meet the final need and describe it here.
I am adding this template to my toolbox of writing patterns,
alongside
Kent Beck's four-sentence abstract
(scroll down to Kent's name), which generalizes the idea of
one startling sentence
that arrests the reader. I also like good advice on how to
write concise, incisive thesis statements, such as that in
Matt Might's
Advice for PhD Thesis Proposals
and Olin Shivers's classic
Dissertation Advice.
As with any template or pattern, overuse can turn a good idea
into a cliché. If readers repeatedly see the same
cookie-cutter format, it begins to look stale and will cause
the reader to lose interest. So play with variations on the
essential theme: I have solved an important problem.
This is my solution.
If you don't have a great abstract, try again. Think hard
about your own work. Why is this problem important? What is
the big win from my solution? That's a key piece of advice
in Might's advice for graduate students: state clearly and
unambiguously what you intend to achieve.
Indeed, approaching your research in a "test-driven" way makes
a lot of sense. Before embarking on a project, try to write
the startling abstract that will open the paper or dissertation
you write when you have succeeded. If you can't identify the
problem as truly important, then why start at all? Maybe you
should pick something more valuable to work on, something that
matters enough you can write a startling abstract for the
esult. That's a key piece of advice shared by Richard Hamming
in his
You and Your Research.
And whatever you do, don't oversell a minor problem or a weak
solution with an abstract that promises too much. Readers will
be disappointed at best and angry at worst. If you oversell
even a little bit too many times, you will become like the boy
who cried wolf. No one will believe your startling claim even
when it's on the mark.
Greenspun's startling abstract ends as strongly as it begins.
Of course, it helps if you can close with a legitimate appeal
to ameliorating poverty around the world:
This area is exciting because so much of the infrastructure is
in place. A small effort by computer scientists could cut the
cost of earthmoving in half, enabling poor countries to build
roads and rich countries to clean up hazardous waste.
I'm not sure adding another automating refactoring to Eclipse or
creating another database library can quite rise to the level of
empowering the world's poor. But then, you may have a different
audience.
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