Writing: Cohesion and Register in a Research Abstract Revision
A candidate drafts a 150-word abstract. The draft reads: "This study is about how students learn. We did a survey. It was big. 240 students answered. The results were interesting. Students who planned their week did better. This is important. It shows planning matters. Teachers should teach planning." The exam task requires an academic register, explicit links between sentences, and no unsupported evaluative adjectives such as "interesting" or "important." The candidate has 20 minutes and must keep the abstract under 150 words while adding the study's context (a single university, one semester) and one limitation.
1. Identify the three most serious weaknesses in the draft relative to the task requirements, with a concrete example of each.
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First, register: "is about," "we did," and "big" are conversational; academic prose would use "examines," "a survey was administered," and "a sample of." Second, cohesion: the draft strings short sentences together without logical connectors, so the relation between the survey and the result is left implicit; a reader cannot tell whether planning caused better performance or merely co-occurred with it. Third, unsupported evaluation: "interesting," "important," and the bare recommendation "Teachers should teach planning" assert value and prescribe practice without evidence or qualification. Each weakness maps directly to a stated requirement, so fixing them is not optional style polishing but the substance of the task. A further issue is missing context and limitation, which the task explicitly demands.
2. Rewrite the abstract in under 150 words, adding context and a limitation, and explain two choices you made to improve cohesion.
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Revised: "This study examines the relationship between weekly planning and academic performance among undergraduates. A survey was administered to 240 students at a single university over one semester. Students who reported planning their week achieved higher course grades than those who did not. The association remained after accounting for study hours. These findings suggest that planning behaviour is associated with academic outcomes; however, the cross-sectional design and single-institution sample limit generalisation, and causal claims cannot be drawn. Future research should test planning interventions experimentally." Cohesion choices: (1) "however" marks the shift from finding to limitation, so the reader sees the move from result to caveat; (2) "These findings suggest" ties the interpretation explicitly back to the survey result instead of leaving an unlinked assertion. Register was raised by replacing "is about" with "examines" and "did a survey" with "a survey was administered," and evaluative adjectives were replaced by evidential verbs such as "suggest" and "limit."