IMO ~170 words is a decent length for a well-written abstract (well maybe ~150 is better), and the problem is that abstracts are often badly written. Steve Easterbrook has a great guide on writing scientific abstracts; here’s his example template which I think flows nicely:
(1) In widgetology, it’s long been understood that you have to glomp the widgets before you can squiffle them. (2) But there is still no known general method to determine when they’ve been sufficiently glomped. (3) The literature describes several specialist techniques that measure how wizzled or how whomped the widgets have become during glomping, but all of these involve slowing down the glomping, and thus risking a fracturing of the widgets. (4) In this thesis, we introduce a new glomping technique, which we call googa-glomping, that allows direct measurement of whifflization, a superior metric for assessing squiffle-readiness. (5) We describe a series of experiments on each of the five major types of widget, and show that in each case, googa-glomping runs faster than competing techniques, and produces glomped widgets that are perfect for squiffling. (6) We expect this new approach to dramatically reduce the cost of squiffled widgets without any loss of quality, and hence make mass production viable.
Yes, with one linebreak, I’d put it at (4). With 2 linebreaks, I’d put it at 4+5. With 3 breaks, 4/5/6. (Giving the full standard format: introduction/background, method, results, conclusion.) If I were annotating that, I would go with 3 breaks.
I wouldn’t want to do a 4th break, and break up 1-3 at all, unless (3) was unusually long and complex and dug into the specialist techniques more than usual so there really was a sort of ‘meaningless super universal background of the sort of since-the-dawn-of-time-man-has-yearned-to-x’ vs ‘ok real talk time, you do X/Y/Z but they all suck for A/B/C reasons; got it? now here’s what you actually need to do:’ genuine background split making it hard to distinguish where the waffle ends and the meat begins.
IMO ~170 words is a decent length for a well-written abstract (well maybe ~150 is better), and the problem is that abstracts are often badly written. Steve Easterbrook has a great guide on writing scientific abstracts; here’s his example template which I think flows nicely:
I still claim this should be three paragraphs. In this breaking at section 4 and section 6 seems to carve it at reasonable joints.
Yeah that seems reasonable! (Personally I’d prefer a single break between sentence 3 and 4)
Yes, with one linebreak, I’d put it at (4). With 2 linebreaks, I’d put it at 4+5. With 3 breaks, 4/5/6. (Giving the full standard format: introduction/background, method, results, conclusion.) If I were annotating that, I would go with 3 breaks.
I wouldn’t want to do a 4th break, and break up 1-3 at all, unless (3) was unusually long and complex and dug into the specialist techniques more than usual so there really was a sort of ‘meaningless super universal background of the sort of since-the-dawn-of-time-man-has-yearned-to-x’ vs ‘ok real talk time, you do X/Y/Z but they all suck for A/B/C reasons; got it? now here’s what you actually need to do:’ genuine background split making it hard to distinguish where the waffle ends and the meat begins.