BI 171 - Modern Biology

Written Assignment - Abstracts

Your writing assignments for this course are abstracts, which are paragraphs that summarize things - in this case, either written articles or major internet websites. Abstracts are routinely written for science journal articles - that way, someone searching for particular material can quickly tell if an article is something they need to read. Abstracts give the theme and "high points" of an article or site without the details. You are going to abstract two biology-oriented articles and two biology-oriented internet website, being as brief as possible while still covering all of the sources’ subjects.

You will read an article or check out a website concerning some aspect of the biological sciences (pick something you can understand!), then reduce it to a single paragraph of information. The trick here is to be brief - try to keep your abstract under 100 words, and definitely hold it under 200 words.

For a magazine/newspaper article: The article you pick must fit the following FOUR CRITERIA: 1) it must be about some aspect of biology; 2) it must be from a reputable source - hard news or science magazine or newspaper - if you’re not sure about a source, ASK!!!; 3) the article must be more than one full page of text (or half a page of text for newspaper articles); 4) it must have been published this year.

For a website: When you pick a website, it must fit criteria 1 & 2 above; for 3, it must consist of more than ten subsidiary web pages (that is, it needs to have subsites with their own separate internet addresses); and for 4, it must have been updated sometime this year.

The format of your abstract will consist of: 1) your name; 2) the title of the article/ website you’re abstracting, written as stated in the next paragraph; 3) the actual written part of your abstract (typed, double spaced!), checked for spelling and grammar; 4) a photocopy of the entire article, or the entire magazine it came from - torn-out pages are not acceptable! (Printouts are not necessary for websites - instead, the address must be absolutely perfect.) For details, see the next page.

THE TITLE:

For the article abstracts will be written in a format like those found in science journals - make sure you follow these directions! Use the following order: 1) the author(s), last name first - all authors must be listed; 2) the year that the article was published (that should be this year); 3) the title of the article, capitalized like a regular sentence would be; 4) the title of the magazine or newspaper the article was in; 5) the volume and issue numbers of the magazine (dates are all right only for newspapers); 6) the pages that the article was on.

The title for the website abstracts will use this order: 1) the website name (this often will appear across the top of the screen at the "home" website, but it may just be on the screen at that site); 2) the date that the site was last updated; 3)the author, if there is one; 4) the support site, if this website is part of a yet larger site (this will rarely be true for these abstracts - check with Mr. McDarby if you have a small site contained in a much larger one!); 5) the full web address ( this is in the long white box and starts "http..." - it's very important to get this exactly right!!); 6) the date that you accessed the site last.

For the article, give a brief but comprehensive summary - briefly tell the basic theme of the article, then state all of the major points or features, including charts, tables, and sidebars. You do not need to go into much detail on anything except, occasionally, major unusual theories.

NOTE: You are either doing an ARTICLE from a paper source or a huge WEBSITE - NOT an article from a website!!!

For the website, start from the main website’s home page (NOTE: if there’s more than two slashes beyond the middle of the address, chances are that you’re not in a main site). Give the basic theme of the site and then all of the major points or features, including types of subsites and links. Even sites with many, many subsites can usually be summarized easily.

                                                                      1st               2nd                3^rd                 4^th

Question - What sort of article, exactly, am I looking for?

First, make sure that you are looking in the right place. Science magazines are good sources, but may be much more technical than you're ready to handle. You want something that you'll be able to understand. "Hard news" magazines or newspapers can be good, too. Once you have a source, make sure that any article you might pick is long enough - it's got to have at least one full page of text - and that it is about biology in some way - in other words, it deals with the workings of living things.

Question - How do I know if I’ve got an appropriate website?

First, check the address - anything with a long address with a bunch of slashes in it is not a main site, but a subsite - find the main site by looking for a "HOME" link or by "peeling back" the address by deleting parts after a slash - work your way back slash by slash until you’ve hit what’s obviously a main website. Then, make sure that it’s biology-related and check - usually near the end somewhere - to see that it was updated this year.

Question - So this is like, some sort of report?

No, it's not like anything you've probably written - the closest assignment to an abstract would be the first part of a book report, where you're telling what the book is about. An abstract is about article content and coverage, not a report about the subject of the article. You also don't get to editorialize - your opinions about the article are irrelevant in an abstract.

Question - How much do I need to tell?

Not much. It's as if someone looked over your shoulder as you were reading and asked, "What kind of article is that?" Your answer would be brief, but a good answer would let the person know the basic theme of the article and all of the major points it covers, so they could tell if it was something they might want to read. Keep it short - you don't need to really explain things, just mention them.

Question - Are there any "tricks" to writing a good abstract?

There are many different tricks. What you want to do is break the article down to "the bare bones," and that can be done by outlining, or by making notes on a photocopy, or by reading and then waiting before you write (that last one is tricky). One definite trick is to use the checklist on the first handout page - if you can check everything off, you'll get a good mark.

Small, Meredith F. 1997. Our babies, ourselves. Natural History, 106(9), pp 42-51.

This article is about how caregiving for infants varies among cultures. Many contrasts between hunter-gatherer cultures and western cultures are given. A brief retrospective of how anthropological studies in this area have changed in focus appears. All of this is integrated into the biology of newborns, in such areas as nutrition and bond development. The suggestion is made that western rearing techniques may be ignoring the cues that come from the babies themselves. Several sidebar articles by other authors accompany the main article - subjects in the sidebars: practices among the Gusii people of Kenya; the rest-centered approach of the Dutch; teaching pediatricians to deal nonjudgmentally with varied approaches in different ethnic groups; effects of different approaches on crying; how long to breast-feed; and effects of parents sleeping with babies.

Rome, Lawrence C. 1997. Testing a muscle's design. American Scientist, 85(4), pp 356-363.

This article reviews the research done by the author connecting the design of a muscle system with the system's particular function. After a brief introduction to muscle mechanics, examples from frog jumping, fish swimming, and toadfish vocalizing are examined in some detail.

This British site, allied with several other major sites with links on the homepage, calls itself the "guide to history of medicine resources on the Internet." It has mainly a search function in this field, but it also offers a "Browse by Category" option with the categories "Diseases," "Electronic publications" (sic), regional breakdowns, miscellany, "Education & research," by periods of history, "Medical speciality & technique," "People," and "Science & technology." Each category offers major reference sources and many subcategories as well. There are many sources that are modern, rather than historical.