Abstraction

                The beginning of March is where one gets excited about the various MLA panels that have been proposed for next year’s convention and which would be the most pertinent to your own research.  It is a time to pull together the abstractions which float in our minds on a daily basis into a concrete form. Coincidentally this is also the time where final exams need to be written and sent to the printer, final assignments are starting to roll in to be graded, and the air outside becomes a bit less crisp and a bit more welcoming.  This means that alongside abstraction we are also faced with distraction.

                I spent time this weekend thinking about the art of writing an abstract for a call for papers, for truly it is an art.  You are given a very small space, sometimes only 250 words, in order to express why your idea would be the best fit to the spirit of the call for papers. You want to demonstrate how well versed you are in the topic, but also you need to establish that your analysis is provides a new or alternative way of understanding the topic.

                In my reflection on the production of an abstract I realized how things like Twitter have really helped the idea of brevity and clarity evolve in my work. You have 140 characters, which often works out to less than 14 words, to express exactly what you want to convey. This is much like the famous short story (often attributed to Hemingway but without the necessary proof): For Sale, Baby Shoes, Never Worn (which is 32 characters).  This six word short story demonstrates that sometimes the most intriguing and beautiful ideas and images can be presented with a minimal amount of words if they are well-selected. 

                When writing a conference abstract, or even an abstract for a journal article, it is often deemed preferable to have 500 words instead of 250. “250 words is too small of a space,” they cry. “How can I ever explain the phenomenological importance of the representation of tactility in 250 words?” However, there is something to be said about the power of editing and distilling our ideas. Academics are often accused of verbose academese; our writing is dense and filled with discipline specific words that make it difficult to understand by those coming from outside our very inscribed circle.  This article gives an excellent example of how we can prune our work.

                Blogging is another kind of writing that often requires brevity in order to increase readership or discoverability (the fancy SEO acronym (search engine optimization) that you often hear thrown around).  Opinion varies as to the ideal length of a blog post but it is usually around 500 to a maximum of 1000 words. Anything longer than that and readers often tune out, unless, as Dan Cohen suggests here, you are going for that fine mixture of journalism and scholarship. 

                My blog has examples of shorter reflections like this one (which is 600 words in case you were wondering), as well as longer academic posts which I use as a way to engage with ideas I may be writing or editing as part of a journal article/research.  Writing abstracts or blog posts is difficult because we strive for that balance. Yet it is in working toward that balance of content, expression, and clarity that our best ideas shine through.  So for those of you trying to meet fast approaching MLA abstract deadlines, I wish you good luck, and remember sometimes word limits for abstracts can be a blessing in disguise – a way to focus our ideas and mute the background noise.