Dear PhD candidates and faculty advisors,
A comment I received in response to my recent post noting the difference between abstracts and summaries made me realize that I had not been clear about what I was proposing when I wrote: "Unlike abstracts which point out what will be covered, such summaries distill what was done and learned. I believe all PhD candidates should write concise summaries to convey the knowledge they develop. This would help communicate what is significant in the field in a way that is useful for building support and getting grant funding to further develop the work."
I should probably have used the term "executive summary” which better conveys what I meant to say. Here is Wikipedia's well stated summary of the differences between an "executive summary" and an “abstract". I encourage all faculty advisors and PhD candidates to provide both well written abstracts and executive summaries as a matter of course in their dissertations. Both serve different and useful purposes as this excerpt points out.
"An executive summary, or management summary, is a short document or section of a document, produced for business purposes, that summarizes a longer report or proposal or a group of related reports in such a way that readers can rapidly become acquainted with a large body of material without having to read it all. It usually contains a brief statement of the problem or proposal covered in the major document(s), background information, concise analysis and main conclusions. It is intended as an aid to decision-making by managers and has been described as the most important part of a business plan.[1][2][3][4]
An executive summary differs from an abstract in that an abstract will usually be shorter and is intended to provide a neutral overview or orientation rather than being a condensed version of the full document. Abstracts are extensively used in academic research where the concept of the executive summary would be meaningless. "An abstract is a brief summarizing statement... read by parties who are trying to decide whether or not to read the main document", while"an executive summary, unlike an abstract, is a document in miniature that may be read in place of the longer document".[5]” Wikipedia
Obviously, I do not think that an executive summary would be “meaningless” in academia. It would be more useful to anyone who wanted to know more about the subject than an abstract can provide; people like potential employers, researchers, funding sources, other disciplines, reviewers, journalists, etc. In short, People who want to understand and act on information that has taken so much effort to establish.
Why not " just do it.” Why can’t an executive summary be the “most important part of a Dissertation or thesis” and a PhD’s future?
I believe it could be!
Chuck
Charles Burnette
[log in to unmask]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|