Abstracts And Abstracting: Genre And Skills For The 21st Cent

Description:
Despite their changing role, abstracts remain useful in the digital world. Highly beneficial to information professionals and researchers who work and publish in different fields, this book summarizes the most important and up-to-date theory of abstracting, as well as giving advice and examples for the practice of writing different kinds of abstracts. The book discusses the length, the functions and basic structure of abstracts. A new approach is outlined on the questions of informative and indicative abstracts. The abstractors' personality, their linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge and skills are also discussed with special attention. Despite the relatively large number of textbooks on the topic there is no up-to-date book on abstracting in the English language. In addition to providing a comprehensive coverage of the topic, the proposed book contains novel views - especially on informative and indicative abstracts. The book is aimed at information professionals and can be used especially in education for library and information science. It is also designed for researchers who work and publish in different fields and write the author-abstracts of their own papers or write abstracts on papers written by someone else. As abstracting is also of interest for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) practitioners, they can also make use of it. Similarly, those who teach technical writing will find many parts useful.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - what is an abstract?; why abstracts and abstracting?; why don't we produce them by computers?; The information literacy context - what is information literacy?; why is it important for the information professional and for the researcher? critical thinking and abstracting; The theory of abstracting - size and functions of the abstract, indicative and informative abstracts, models of abstracting; rule-based approaches; The abstractor - knowledge, skills, personality and training; The practice of abstracting - reading, writing and revising; special reading techniques; how to eliminate unnecessary details?; how to retain enough information? rules of thumb; Examples - how to apply the rules? successful informative and indicative abstracts.

Author Biography:
Dr Koltay is Professor, Head of Department and Course Director for Library and Information Science curricula at the Department of Information and Library Studies, Szent Istvan University, Faculty of Applied and Professional Arts, Jaszbereny. He also teaches at the Department of Library and Information Science, University of West Hungary, Szombathely, both Hungary. He is an experienced abstractor who wrote over 200 abstracts and has been teaching abstracting since 1992.