Abstracting
and Summarising Quickly and Accurately
Programme
Features
A practical
introduction to the key techniques used in abstracting
and summarising documents of all kinds - news items, articles,
books, reports and unpublished internal documents. The
course includes:
- What do
we want our abstracts to achieve?
- What to
include in an abstract
- Signposting
- gathering material for the abstract
- Writing
an abstract with only limited resource material
- Rapid reading
techniques
- Writing
abstracts that are accurate, comprehensive, stylish
and fast.
Why you should
attend:
Information
overload affects everyone, and there is an urgent need
for people who can extract the key facts and opinions
from documents rapidly and reproduce them accurately.
Abstracting and summarising techniques are essential for
current awareness services, enquiry answering and desk
research, preparing briefings and writing reports. This
course reassures participants that abstracting is a learnable
skill which we all practise in our daily lives, and shows
how we can use our ordinary reading and writing skills
more efficiently to improve our abstracting technique.
This course reassures participants that summarising -
and the rapid reading that goes with it - are learnable
skills, and shows how we can use our existing reading
and writing skills more efficiently to improve our abstracting
technique. Directed by Tim Buckley Owen, who has more
than 20 years' experience in abstracting, report writing
and journalism, the course includes practical exercises
based on a range of different document types.
On completing
this course, you will be able to:
- Scan documents
rapidly
- Identify
their key content
- Summarise
or describe that content
- Observe
house style rules
- Write to
length and to deadline
