Examples of Abstract: Good, Bad and Ugly

EXAMPLES OF ABSTRACTS: GOOD, BAD, AND UGLY

Two examples of abstracts are provided here to provide some guidance for writing abstracts

which are to be included in the CE 3020 laboratory reports. Both abstracts are from

published journals, but one is poorly written and the other is well written. Critiques are

made for both to emphasize the writing style and type of information expected in a well

written abstract. Details about technical writing style and the information to be included in

an abstract can be found in the course handout, “Style Requirements for Laboratory

Reports”, also available online at http://www.ce.gatech.edu/~kkurtis/labstyle.pdf

A Poorly Written Abstract

experience is ready for the students. Next, we describe a way to administer and execute

the capstone design experience including design workshops and lead engineers. We

describe the importance in assessing the capstone design experience and report recent

assessment results of our framework. We comment specifically on what students thought

were the most important aspects of their experience in engineering capstone design and

provide quantitative insight into what parts of the framework are most important.

Critique:

(1) This abstract begins well with a concise statement of the objectives of the paper, but

then wanders from good technical writing style from there.

(2) The abstract is written in the first person (e.g. “We explain…”, “We discuss…”, “We

Instead, the abstract should summarize the actual results and how they were obtained.

Example:

“A statistical analysis was performed on answers to survey questions posed to

students enrolled in a capstone design course at Georgia Tech. The analysis

showed that students thought the most important aspects of their experience in

engineering capstone design were quality of the instructor and quantity of

student/instructor interaction time.”