Improvements on objectivity of English abstracts for academic papers
Sun Chao-ping · 2004
As an abbreviated, accurate representation of the contents of a paper without added interpretation or criticism, English abstracts, whose salient feature is objectivity,constitute the shortest form of EST. their chief purposes are to help the readers grasp the main content quickly, determine whether the content is interesting or relevant to their fields of research and decides whether they are going to read them in full or not. This paper, from the perspectives of grammatical features like the wide use of the passive voice and the simple present tense as well as of lexical features like the specific use of pronouns and that of nominalizations, explores methods to improve the objectivity of academic papers.