What’s there to highlight, really? The point is that it looks like a normal abstract… but not one-paragraph. (I’ve mused about moving in a much more aggressive Elicit-style direction and trying to get a GPT to add the standardized keywords where valid but omitted. GPT-4 surely can do that adequately.)
I suppose if you want a comparison, skimming my newest, the first entry right now is Sánchez-Izquierdo et al 2023 and that is an example of reformatting an abstract to add linebreaks which improve its readability:
This is not a complex abstract and far from the worst offender, but it’s still harder to read than it needs to be.
It is written in the standard format, but the writing is ESL-awkward (the ‘one of those’ clause is either bad grammar or bad style), the order of points is a bit messy & confusing (defining the hazard ratio—usually not written in caps—before the point of the meta-analysis or what it’s updating? horse/cart), and the line-wrapping does one no favors. Explicitly breaking it up into intro/method/results/conclusion makes it noticeably more readable.
(In addition, this shows some of the other tweaks I usually make: like being explicit about what ‘Calvin’ is, avoiding the highly misleading ‘significance’ language, avoiding unnecessary use of obsolete Roman numerals (newsflash, people: we have better, more compact, easier-to-read numbers—like ‘1’ & ‘2’!), and linking fulltext rather than contemptuously making the reader fend for themselves even though one could so easily have linked it).
What’s there to highlight, really? The point is that it looks like a normal abstract… but not one-paragraph. (I’ve mused about moving in a much more aggressive Elicit-style direction and trying to get a GPT to add the standardized keywords where valid but omitted. GPT-4 surely can do that adequately.)
I suppose if you want a comparison, skimming my newest, the first entry right now is Sánchez-Izquierdo et al 2023 and that is an example of reformatting an abstract to add linebreaks which improve its readability:
This is not a complex abstract and far from the worst offender, but it’s still harder to read than it needs to be.
It is written in the standard format, but the writing is ESL-awkward (the ‘one of those’ clause is either bad grammar or bad style), the order of points is a bit messy & confusing (defining the hazard ratio—usually not written in caps—before the point of the meta-analysis or what it’s updating? horse/cart), and the line-wrapping does one no favors. Explicitly breaking it up into intro/method/results/conclusion makes it noticeably more readable.
(In addition, this shows some of the other tweaks I usually make: like being explicit about what ‘Calvin’ is, avoiding the highly misleading ‘significance’ language, avoiding unnecessary use of obsolete Roman numerals (newsflash, people: we have better, more compact, easier-to-read numbers—like ‘1’ & ‘2’!), and linking fulltext rather than contemptuously making the reader fend for themselves even though one could so easily have linked it).