Revising a Research Abstract for an Academic Panel
A Grade 12 student is revising the abstract of a research paper for a school congress. The draft contains these sentences: (1) "Our study proves that social media causes poor sleep among students." (2) "We surveyed 42 students using a 10-item questionnaire." (3) "The data was collected last March, and the results was analyzed using simple percentages." The adviser says the abstract must be accurate, concise, and appropriate for an audience of teachers and judges. The word limit is 150 words; the draft is currently at 210 words. The student must decide what to cut, what to soften, and what to correct before submitting the final copy that afternoon.
1. Explain what is wrong with sentence (1) as an academic claim, and rewrite it so it is defensible.
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The problem is not grammar but overclaiming. Three separate issues sit inside one short sentence:
- "Proves" claims certainty. A single descriptive survey cannot prove causation.
- "Causes" asserts a causal relationship, but the design (one questionnaire, one point in time) can only show association.
- "Students" is an unqualified generalisation. The evidence covers 42 respondents from one school.
A defensible revision keeps the finding but narrows the scope and the verb:
"Among the 42 students surveyed, heavier reported social media use was associated with poorer self-reported sleep quality."
Note the three repairs: a hedge ("was associated with"), an explicit population ("the 42 students surveyed"), and self-report acknowledged as the measure. The claim is now weaker than the original but is one the data can actually support - which is what the adviser's word "accurate" requires.
2. Correct sentence (3). Address every error, and note any point where usage is genuinely debatable rather than simply wrong.
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The sentence contains two agreement problems of different status.
Unambiguously wrong: "the results was analyzed." The subject "results" is plural, so it must be "the results were analyzed."
Debated: "the data was collected." In everyday usage "data" is often treated as a mass noun taking a singular verb, but in formal academic writing it is conventionally plural (singular datum), so "the data were collected" is the safer choice for this audience of teachers and judges.
Also worth fixing: the tense shift and the comma splice pattern. "Is collected ... was analyzed" is not the issue here, but the sentence joins two independent clauses with a comma, which many editors would tighten.
A revised version:
"Data were collected last March, and results were analyzed using simple percentages."
The judgement point: not every usage issue carries the same weight. "Results was" is an error; "data was" is a register choice. Fixing both is correct here, but the student should know which one a judge would actually mark.
3. The draft is 60 words over the limit. Using the three sentences as a starting point, state which material should be cut first and justify the choice by a criterion other than length alone.
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The cut should be governed by what the audience needs in order to trust the finding, not by what is easiest to delete.
Ranking the content:
- Keep the method details (sentence 2). Sample size and instrument are what let a judge assess the claim. Deleting "42 students" or "10-item questionnaire" would save about 8 words and cost the abstract its credibility.
- Keep nothing that has already been cut. Sentence (1) was already compressed during the hedging revision; further trimming there would undo the accuracy fix.
- Cut first: background and rationale sentences. Abstracts usually open with two or three sentences explaining why the topic matters. Those are the least load-bearing for a reader deciding whether the result is sound, and they are the easiest to replace with a single framing clause.
- Cut second: restated conclusions. A closing sentence that repeats the finding in different words is pure redundancy.
So the answer is not "delete the longest sentence" - the longest sentence might be the method. The criterion is evidential weight: keep what a sceptical reader needs to check the claim, cut what only sets the scene.