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Other ideas - Abstracts

Written Assignment - Abstracts

Your writing assignments for this course are abstracts, which are paragraphs that summarize things - in this case, either written articles or major internet websites. Abstracts are routinely written for science journal articles - that way, someone searching for particular material can quickly tell if an article is something they need to read. Abstracts give the theme and "high points" of an article or site without the details. You are going to abstract two biology-oriented articles and two biology-oriented internet website, being as brief as possible while still covering all of the sources’ subjects.
You will read an article or check out a website concerning some aspect of the biological sciences (pick something you can understand!), then reduce it to a single paragraph of information. The trick here is to be brief - try to keep your abstract under 100 words, and definitely hold it under 200 words.
 
For a magazine/newspaper article: The article you pick must fit the following FOUR CRITERIA: 1) it must be about some aspect of biology; 2) it must be from a reputable source - hard news or science magazine or newspaper - if you’re not sure about a source, ASK!!!; 3) the article must be more than one full page of text (or half a page of text for newspaper articles); 4) it must have been published this year.
For a website: When you pick a website, it must fit criteria 1 & 2 above; for 3, it must consist of more than ten subsidiary web pages (that is, it needs to have subsites with their own separate internet addresses); and for 4, it must have been updated sometime this year.
 
The format of your abstract will consist of: 1) your name; 2) the title of the article/ website you’re abstracting, written as stated in the next paragraph; 3) the actual written part of your abstract (typed, double spaced!), checked for spelling and grammar; 4) a photocopy of the entire article, or the entire magazine it came from - torn-out pages are not acceptable! (Printouts are not necessary for websites - instead, the address must be absolutely perfect.) For details, see the next page.
 
THE TITLE:
For the article abstracts will be written in a format like those found in science journals - make sure you follow these directions! Use the following order: 1) the author(s), last name first - all authors must be listed; 2) the year that the article was published (that should be this year); 3) the title of the article, capitalized like a regular sentence would be; 4) the title of the magazine or newspaper the article was in; 5) the volume and issue numbers of the magazine (dates are all right only for newspapers); 6) the pages that the article was on.
 
The title for the website abstracts will use this order: 1) the website name (this often will appear across the top of the screen at the "home" website, but it may just be on the screen at that site); 2) the date that the site was last updated; 3)the author, if there is one; 4) the support site, if this website is part of a yet larger site (this will rarely be true for these abstracts - check with Mr. McDarby if you have a small site contained in a much larger one!); 5) the full web address ( this is in the long white box and starts "http..." - it's very important to get this exactly right!!); 6) the date that you accessed the site last.
 
THE BODY OF THE ABSTRACT:
For the article, give a brief but comprehensive summary - briefly tell the basic theme of the article, then state all of the major points or features, including charts, tables, and sidebars. You do not need to go into much detail on anything except, occasionally, major unusual theories.
NOTE: You are either doing an ARTICLE from a paper source or a huge WEBSITE - NOT an article from a website!!!
For the website, start from the main website’s home page (NOTE: if there’s more than two slashes beyond the middle of the address, chances are that you’re not in a main site). Give the basic theme of the site and then all of the major points or features, including types of subsites and links. Even sites with many, many subsites can usually be summarized easily.