What is an Abstract or an Executive Summary?

Abstracts and executive summaries are concise, very short (often less than a page) summaries of a longer piece of work (a journal article, a formal report, etc.). They touch on the major points of the work, and address purpose, scope, and methods used to arrive at reported findings, and must accurately describe the longer piece of work. However, there are some distinctions between these two types of summaries.

Abstracts (independent of the documents for which they were written) are often published in bound and/or computer-retrievable periodical indexes, such as the American Statistics Index. These indexes help researchers "abstract" information from specific fields of study, and enable the researchers to review a larger body of information quickly. Abstracts usually contain all the important terms that researchers might need in order to index the original document by subject.

Abstracts may also be descriptive or informative, depending on their scope:

• A descriptive abstract (25-250 words) summarizes information about purpose, scope, and methods used to arrive at findings; it may be like a table of contents of the longer work in sentence form. Descriptive abstracts are crucial for progress reports and documents that compile information.
• An informative abstract is an expanded version of the descriptive abstract; it includes results, conclusions, and recommendations from the original research. An informative abstract also retains the tone and scope of the original work, and may be as lengthy as up to 10% of the original document size (though clearly it must omit background and a great deal of detail). Informative abstracts satisfy the widest possible researcher indexing needs.

  Executive Summaries are a kind of informative abstract aimed at busy executives. They comprehensively restate document purpose, scope, methods, findings, results, conclusions, and recommendations; their purpose is to aid the executive to make personnel, funding, or policy decisions. Executive summaries should be written so that they can be read independently of the report: mirroring the report in enough detail to reflect the contents accurately, but concisely enough so that a busy reader can quickly digest its significance.

  Directions:
  Write a 1/2-1 page executive summary for your proposal, and hand it in with your paper.

  Tips for Proceeding:

  • Think about the main points, or sections, of your paper.
  • Remember that you need to include all the major points (ex.: scope, problem, methodology, feasibility,proposed solution), but you will also need to cut out a great deal of detail and background information.
  • Ask a friend to read your summary; are all the points clear? Is your summary enough to give the reader a full understanding of your complete proposal, and in particular of the action(s) recommended?

    Objectives: * Summarizing long pieces of work; Abstracting papers for research purposes. Revised: 8-15-97/EdC