Guidelines for Writing Abstracts in English

As part of your dissertation (mémoire) in year 5, you are expected to write an abstract in English. This is a short text (approximately 150 - 350 words long) that summarizes your thesis. It usually includes the following information:

  1. A statement of your subject.
  2. A description of how you have approached and treated it.
  3. Basic conclusions (if any) and perhaps...
  4. other questions that have been raised but not answered yet.

Optionally, some abstracts can end with a list of key words. This step is virtually obsolete today because data-mining, natural language machine-learning and AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms do a good job of indexing significant terms.

The purpose of an abstract is to give other students and researchers a clear, concise idea of your subject area and general content of your dissertation. It helps decide quickly whether your work is relevant or not to their own investigations.

Abstract-o-matic Writing Method

Resources

Selected abstracts from other students‘ dissertations.

Examples of abstracts.

Index of PhD dissertations published in the USA and Canada (subject and title).

Useful words and expressions for abstracts.

Further Help

If you are stuck, write your abstract in French then use DeepL to translate. Send me a copy of both versions plus a light version (e.g. export pdf for web) of your dissertation.
And of course let me know at any time if you want to discuss or get feedback.

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