Abstract:
An abstract represents the summary of a piece of scholarly writing. It is imperative for
academics to include all essential rhetorical moves when writing an academic
conference abstract (CA). The aim of this study was to investigate variations in the
abstracts of the soft sciences abstracts (SSA) and that of the hard sciences (HSA) with
a focus on rhetorical structure, sequence and metadiscourse elements. Two corpora
were compiled comprising 30 abstracts from SSA and HSA purposively selected from
the 4th International Postgraduate Conference, Cape Coast, Ghana and the Convention
of Biomedical Research Ghana (CoBReG) books of abstracts for 2018. Hyland’s (2000)
model of rhetorical moves for abstracts comprising introduction (I), purpose (P),
method (M), product (Pr) and conclusion (C), as well as Hyland’s (2005) elements of
metadiscourse which comprise 64 boosters and 101 hedges were used for the analysis
of the selected abstracts. From the results, 43.3% of HSA followed Hyland’s (2000)
rhetorical structure whereas only 33.3% of SSA followed the model. Also, purpose,
method, product and conclusion were obligatory moves whereas the introduction move
was optional in the SSA. On the other hand, only method and product moves were
obligatory with the rest being conventional in SSA. The most dominant move sequence
for HSA was I-P-M-Pr-C (46.7%) followed by I-M-Pr-C (17%) and I-P-M-Pr (17%)
whereas P-M-Pr-C (43.3%) was the most dominant sequence followed by I-P-M-Pr-C
(33.3%) for SSA. Also, HSA employed more boosters (37) than SSA which included
only 34 boosters. However, HSA included less hedges than SSA which were 58 and 69
respectively. The findings of this study provide a pedagogical support for future
conference participants towards writing more successful conference abstracts
Description:
A Thesis in the Department Of Communication and Media Studies, Faculty of
Foreign Languages Education and Communication, Submitted to the School of
Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment
of the requirements for the award of the degree of
Master of Philosophy
(Communication Skills)
in The University Of Education, Winneba
SEPTEMBER, 2019
