ASLIB: The Association for Information Management.
The Association for Information Management
Abstracting and Summarizing Quickly and Accurately
Non-members: £325 plus VAT (if applicable)
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A practical introduction to the key techniques used in abstracting and summarizing documents of all kinds.
Abstracting and summarizing techniques are essential for current awareness services, enquiry answering, desk research, preparing briefings and writing reports. This course is a practical introduction to key techniques in abstracting and summarizing documents: news items, articles, books, reports and unpublished internal documents, and shows participants how existing reading and writing skills can be used more efficiently to improve abstracting technique.
Course highlights:
The programme will cover:
- 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 summarizing techniques are essential for current awareness services, enquiry answering and desk research, preparing briefings and writing reports.
This course reassures participants that summarizing - 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 30 years' experience in abstracting, report writing and journalism, the course includes practical exercises based on a range of different document types.
On completing the course, you will be able to:
- Scan documents rapidly
- Identify their key content
- Summarize or describe that content
- Observe house style rules
- Write to length and to deadline
Course Director:
Tim Buckley Owen
Time:
09:30 - 16.30
Companion courses:
Comments:
A previous delegate has said: "Never having written an abstract in my life, I will now have the confidence to give it a go."
