Title: Mapping the moves: Considering transparency and accessibility as guiding concepts when writing academic abstracts

Author: Barbara Reschenhofer

Theme: Innovation & Creativity in Teaching

Undergraduate, graduate, and even postgraduate students oftentimes struggle with structure and content when writing academic abstracts. Particularly early-stage students and researchers commonly have trouble discerning the purpose of abstracts from the role of introductions in their own writing. This not seldomly results in a misguided copying and pasting of excerpts from the introduction in place of a fully functional and sufficiently informative abstract. Drawing on my research and first-hand experiences as an EAP instructor, I argue that by explicitly discussing concepts such as the Paywall and Open Access research in the classroom, the role of the abstract becomes clearer and more easily discernible from a short introduction, for instance. In addition to the concepts of transparency and accessibility, the well-established concept of “moves” can then be used to reinforce student understanding of an abstract’s function, depending on the nature of the piece of writing and its field of research. As the title and abstract are oftentimes the only freely accessible parts of a publication, the necessity for the abstract to include key moves becomes comprehensible and plausible for early-stage students. As research has become – and continues to grow – increasingly digitalized, a transparent discussion about the accessibility of research not only gives students essential knowledge about the academic landscape but also a sense of agency to contribute and disseminate accessible information outside of the Paywall.

Keywords: accessibility, EAP, abstract writing, abstract moves, academic writing skills, accessible science