This post is part of my series on writing accessible abstracts. A well-written abstract or research statement is one key strategy to help your research reach a broader audience.

Writing Accessible Abstracts

This Writing is Thinking makeover starts with a very brief abstract for a published article in philosophy. The new “after” abstract aims to meet two key criteria:

• Be as informative as possible about the original contributions of the article.
• Be as accessible as possible to non-expert audiences.

The article I chose for this abstract makeover was published in one of the top journals in philosophy, Ethics. It is high quality work from an established scholar, and it has an acceptable abstract that is appropriate for its context. The article is relatively technical, so it makes a great example to show what is possible when we translate dense scholarship for non-expert readers. My makeover is not a critique of the original work, but a new format for it—a transformation that can show scholars one example of how they might package their research to reach a broader audience. The abstracts I provide here are much longer than the original, which makes it easier to make them more accessible. This journal accepts abstracts up to 250 words, and the original abstract is just 86 words. For the makeover, I first wrote up an extended abstract at 474 words, then cut it down to 195 words. I recommend authors follow this process and develop an extended abstract to test with non-specialist reader. Then cut it down from there.

Expanding your Target Audience: Why write an accessible abstract?

Who will be reading your abstract? Who do you want to engage with your work?

Even if you do not want to become a public scholar, you do have reason to hope the colleagues in your department or in your field can understand the basics of what you do. It turns out that writing for non-specialists in your field is not that different than writing for people who are not in your field at all. I chose the article for this post to illustrate this point. The article engages with the sub-field of philosophy and ethics called Action Theory. I have a PhD in philosophy, but I work on Feminist Philosophy and Existentialism—areas that engage with ethical questions but do not share any core texts with action theory. The author is certain to to encounter similar other scholars, who are in related fields but adjacent to his specialty, whether in his department or in a department where he presents a talk [1]. Though Action Theory is a relatively large subfield, it is mostly unfamiliar to me—and to many other scholars that might read the journal where the article appeared. The original abstract that accompanies this article gave me only the vaguest sense of what the article does. In my rewrite, I tried to write an abstract that would inform any reader about the substantive content of the article. This is a tricky but manageable task (and tips for doing this follow the makeover below).

If you need more motivation for writing an accessible abstract, check out this research about how papers that have titles or abstracts with less jargon get cited more! (Reflections on this research without a paywall can be found here.)

The Crucial Editing Caveat

Whenever I return a manuscript to an author, I remind them of the most fundamental aspect of editing: an editor’s comments and changes are suggestions for you to accept, reject, or modify. Only the author can determine if the edited text says what they meant for it to say. When an editor’s changes get it wrong, it creates the opportunity for an author to see how readers might misunderstand her. In these cases, an author has the opportunity to clarify herself so future readers don’t make the same mistakes.

The abstract makeover in this post never went back to the author of the article for this final evaluation.

It is possible, and even likely, that my summary makes mistakes or misrepresents the claims of the article. I did my best as a careful reader to get the ideas in the article right. I did substantial intellectual work to try to translate the technical language to more accessible prose. In particular, I supplied concrete examples to the best of my understanding of the article’s concepts. It is possible that my examples are all wrong and my brief summaries of the theories are incomplete. If this were my work with a client, it would go back to the author to give them the chance to say, “Yes! That’s it” or “No. That’s not what I meant at all.” The client would gain insight into their reader’s experience—coming to see where they had not been as clear as they thought or where they inadvertently led readers astray. Because my work with clients is confidential, I chose to makeover this sample article that is publicly available. My interpretation has not been reviewed by the author for accuracy.

The Before and After

 So here it is! The Writing is Thinking Abstract Makeover. Here you can see the “Before” and “After” versions of the abstract that are less than 200 words. You can also download a PDF of the complete Before and After transformation, which includes an extended abstract (under 500 words) that aims to be even more accessible.

Key Features of this Makeover

There are three elements to this makeover that can serve anyone who wants to write better abstracts and write more accessibly in general. They all boil down to: consider your reader. The more specific examples you can use the better—take the initiative to teach your reader. And answer two fundamental questions: 1. what does the reader need to know to follow along with me? and 2. what do I want to leave the reader with?

Use of Examples

This feedback applies to any scholarly writing, from abstract to article to book: use more examples. This is one of the most important ways you can make your concepts more accessible—and more intelligible—to a reader. The analytic tradition in philosophy, which this article belongs to, prioritizes technical definitions and is light on examples. That works out okay when authors are speaking to experts in their specialty, and many authors choose to address themselves exclusively to this audience. But these technical definitions are not very reader-friendly. An author can alternatively choose to teach their reader some of what they need to follow along, and using examples is one of the best strategies for this.

As I read through this technical article, I tried to test my understanding of its definitions by generating examples. In the extended abstract (which you can find in the handout available for download above), I came up with a few concrete examples, about how someone might justify driving over the speed limit—and what we would say about their motivating and normative reasons. Because there weren’t many examples in the article, I’m not very confident I applied its concepts and definitions correctly. I would be much more confident if the author had provided a few examples, and I was extending its analysis to a new one.

I imagine the vast majority of people reading this blog post are not versed in technical philosophy or Action Theory. I hope you can see the drastic difference between reading a definition and being shown how it applies to an example. The latter strategy makes writing profoundly more accessible. I encourage writers to provide their own examples as much as possible. Even if those examples don’t make it into a short abstract, they help you reach whatever readers might come along. This strategy is valuable in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences alike.

What does the reader need to know to follow along ?

When you think about writing as teaching, you may become more aware of the order you present information. This is so tough for a writer who is an expert in their field—perhaps unless they are teaching often. An expert may have lost the sense of what may be new to an unfamiliar student and what tools that student (or reader) needs in order to grasp their main points. In these accessible abstracts, I erred on the side of presenting more introductory, or fundamental, information. In order to have the space to do this, I chose to give a less comprehensive preview of the article. You’ll note that in my abstracts, I ended up leaving out (or only briefly touching) the point that the author uses his new definitions to argue against one particular type of view, Objectivist views. In the 32 page article, this section took up 10 pages. The author might find this omission unacceptable.

In my makeover, I chose to aim for accessibility and significance, even at the cost of comprehensiveness. I judged it worthwhile to include a little background information about the “Internalism Requirement.” In the original abstract, the author described his original view, “Rational Internalism,” as “a principle concerning the relationship between motivating reasons…and normative reasons [italics mine].” I wanted to rewrite the abstract to flesh out the vague phrase, “concerning the relationship.” I wondered if it were possible to give a reader more information about what Rational Internalism says exactly about this relationship? I found I needed to introduce the “Internalism Requirement” to situate the principle of “Rational Internalism,” taking up valuable space in the abstract. In the end, I still had to resort to a vague phrase, “there is a crucial relationship,” but I was able to get more specific about Rational Internalism and what it claims, in terms of facts and mental states. If I were working with a client, I’d want to go back and forth on this a bit, to probe whether I was understanding correctly and if the author could do a better job of specifying the exact relationship. This process generates an abstract that gives the reader information about the content of this new view, not merely the structure of the paper. This is an important task for an abstract, as it gives something to the reader who does not go on to read the paper—and it invites more readers to keep reading.

I also chose to take up space in the abstract to amplify a point which is barely addressed in the original abstract. The author tells us that his new view, the “Reasoning View” is compatible with Rational Internalism and with the existence of objective values. In reading the paper, I discovered why this is important—some scholars have argued that the Internalism Requirement is not compatible with the existence of objective value. And here, the author has created a view that allows scholars to preserve both of these features instead of having to sacrifice one! I aimed to produce an abstract that would tell a reader why the contributions of the paper are important—even if the reader doesn’t go on to read the paper. I think that a reader who sees the significance of the paper from the start is more likely to be interested in reading it through and staying with it through the challenging technical sections. I think the author was underselling his point by not including this information in the abstract, and I found it underemphasized in the paper too.

I recently worked with a client on an abstract that included the phrase, “[My view] has better consequences than [X view].” Why not tell us exactly what better consequences, even in the abstract? An accessible abstract presents the content of an article’s key theses and shows us why they matter.

With an accessible abstract, you want to provide a reader with enough knowledge and interest to want to read the paper, even if you don’t cover every point that the paper makes. The reader is much more likely to get to those points too if they actually go on to read the article. Contrast this with a reader who can list a series of points the article makes but has no curiosity sparked to read it. To give the reader what they need to know to follow your point, you may have to include brief background information in the abstract. Working with a non-expert reader (or an editor) is one way to identify the minimum information you need to include to accommodate, and teach, your reader.

What do you want to leave the reader with?

The abstract provides you with the opportunity to ask a fundamental question: what do you want your reader to leave with, once they’ve read your work? So many authors have not articulated their answer to this question. And for many other authors, the answer to this question is buried 10 pages, or 30 pages, into their work. In an ideal situation, the answer to this question would be the first sentence of your abstract. If it isn’t the first sentence, then every sentence that comes before it should be only what is immediately necessary to help your reader get to that main point. Sometimes it requires a lot of steps. In my short abstract makeover above, I think the point is the second to last sentence: “I give a the first/a good unifying view.” I’d be curious to find out if the author of this paper agrees that was his main point—it might not have been. If this author were my client, I would start by helping him identify the answer to this question, then work through the process of “what is the bare minimum a reader needs to know in order to get there?” I have worked with clients before that have restructured their paper, or at least its introduction, after working with their abstract in this way.

Writing an accessible abstract is about doing the work to reach your reader. This may involve actual conversation and feedback from a reader or editor. It is a lot of work to transform your writing in this way. But it is work that pays off, for both you and your reader. The reader has a more engaging, enjoyable experience with your prose. And your ideas reach more people. If you are not writing and publishing to reach others, then why are you writing? If reaching others is your goal, the work to make yourself understood by your readers is worth your time, effort, and maybe even money.

[1] I do not mean to suggest that this scholar has not adequately adapted his work for these contexts–he almost certainly has produced talks and presentations for broader audiences. I chose this article because I have not encountered his work in those contexts, as will be true of many other readers of the journal. This is just one example of what a first encounter with someone’s work might look like, and how it might be used as an opportunity to engage with a wider selection of readers.