Stylistic Analysis And Writing Of English Abstract For A Scientific Paper

The scientific paper generally includes English abstract with key words. The abstract is a concise and summary statement of the paper without the annotation. The functions of the abstract are to help readers comprehend the content of an article as soon as possible, and provide the convenience for the inclusion of scientific informative retrieval systems (for instance, SCI, El, ISTP, etc.). It concerns the international interflow of Chinese scientific paper. Therefore the English abstract writing is vital, but nowadays Chinese undergraduates or postgraduates still have considerable difficulties in writing English abstract. As to English abstract writing for the scientific paper, there exist some literatures concerned with English abstract writing, but the viewpoints are different on many respects, even hold contrary opinions, which puzzles readers.From the point of view of stylistics, this paper studies English abstract writing by theoretical analysis and statistical method. Major research contents are the: (1) syntactic features (sentence length, tenses, and voices); (2) lexical features (word characteristics and word formation); (3) semantic features (connectives, rhetorical devices, and discourse pattern).Major work of this paper includes three respects as follows: (1) Based on the induction of relevant statements at home and abroad, I analyze writing contents of above-mentioned three respects; (2) According to lexical and semantic features of scientific paper writing, I conclude and illustrate that English abstract for a scientific paper also has same features; (3) As to disputable questions on length (abstract length) and syntax (sentence length, tenses, and voices), etc., this paper presents author's view according to statistics of sampled 20 English abstracts from electronic journals published by John Wiley and Blackwell, and combining theoretical analysis, and new international tendency. Then gives writing suggestions about them: (1) conforming to concrete type and contents of the paper as well as abstract characteristics; (2) adapting to the requirements and customs of the relevant journal and retrieval system.Besides, in order to provide English abstract writing convenience for undergraduates and postgraduates, the computer aided writing software prototype of English abstract, implemented in Delphi programming language, is attached as appendix at the end of this paper.I hope that the above discussion regarding English abstract writing also will be beneficial to English abstract writing for other scientific and technical papers (for example, academic degree thesis).