Teaching Students to Write Abstracts.

A teaching strategy has been developed for showing business and technical writing students how to write abstracts. The strategy contains six steps: (1) explain the importance of abstracts; (2) define summary and descriptive abstracts; (3) give students general guidelines for preparing abstracts; (4) explain topic and sentence outlines, showing the relationship between the two kinds of outlines and the two kinds of abstracts; (5) use an inclass assignment to give students practice writing abstracts; and (6) make appropriate followup assignments. This method of approaching abstracts will give students the basics and prepare them for writing abstracts in professional situations. (RL)