A comparative analysis of the rhetorical moves and metadiscourse elements in abstracts of science conferences

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