Dear all,
I'm happy to see that most of you have managed to create your blog. The first post was an introduction, which most of you have done already. Those of you who haven´t completed the task yet, please catch up. Now, you should improve your introductory post having in mind all the corrections that we discussed on our last session. But, please do NOT delete the original introduction. Also, you should write your first draft of the abstract and upload it the latest on Thursday at 13.00. This is because you´re expected to write 3 comments on somebody else´s draft, so you need some time for that too. The comments are meant for you to express your opinions about what your classmates have written both in terms of content and form.
The first draft of your abstracts should be about 250 words long. I recommend you to follow these guidelines (adapted from Swales, J. and Feak, C. 2009.
Abstracts and the Writing of Abstracts. The Michigan Series in English for Academic and Professional Purposes):
1. Write the title and keywords (even if you are not writing the full article now, it would be useful to refer to the title and keywords as reference).
2. Write a clear introduction, one or two sentences, in which you refer to what is known about the topic or field (use the Nature and the perinatology sample abstracts as examples or any other that you may find appropriate). (What do people know about this topic?)
3. Write the purpose of your research (What is your study about?)
4. Describe the methods/materials/procedures/informants etc. (How was your study done?)
5. Results/findings (What was discovered?)
6. Discussion, conclusion, implications and or recommendations (What do the findings mean?).
We will discuss and analyse some of the drafts in class.
Finally, I expect to upload some model questions that can be used as reference to ask the Professors after their talk.
Best,
Claudia
