![]() Imagine you’re talking to an undergraduate who’s just stepped into your introductory class. Use succinct, short sentences – and write in plain English.Explain the impact of the work – what is going to change (especially in relation to wider society)?.This may not always coincide with a temporal order. ![]() Give some background and context to the research.Predict and cover the “so what?” factor – justify your research.Here are some pointers on how to write a useful lay summary: In short: this is a communications skill worth learning. Among other things, they’re great for use in press releases or when communicating with journalists. Writing such summaries – distilling your work into a “portable” and maximally-accessible form can bring many benefits for your wider interactions with society at large. Lay summaries are already commonly used by researchers in many subject areas, as they encourage and increase the possibility of collaboration, and some funding bodies even require them as part of their application procedure. The most important part of it is a “summary within a summary”: one final sentence which explains why the research is important, and what the article has concluded. Answering these questions in a concise manner will deliver all the details the reader needs. The structure of a lay summary should answer the main questions of “who/what/where/when/how many/why?” (in essence, you’re trying to justify why someone should spend time in reading what you’ve produced). This element differentiates it from the abstract, which is designed with your subject peers in mind. Fundamentally, what you’re aiming to produce is a short paragraph outlining the article content, aimed at non-specialists in the field and written in a way that they can easily understand. The key to doing this is in producing a lay summary.Ī lay summary, or impact statement, is a very efficient way of conveying the essence of your article briefly and clearly. If you can transform your article into something that the wider public can understand, you’ve got yourself another readership - and one who is more likely to share what it is that you’ve discovered/hypothesized/confirmed further. What’s more, researchers are increasingly tasked by their institutions and funders to outline the impact of their research for the general public and beyond their specific area of interest. Though your colleagues and peers are probably able to get to grips with your article, the chances are that its content will be unintelligible to the average man or woman in the street. How do you stand out amongst that enormous crowd and get attention? One way of doing this is to make your article as accessible as possible and a good way of achieving that aim is to prepare a lay summary. Unfortunately, so have another 2.5 million articles just this year. After many long months, your hard work has paid off and that paper has now taken its place in the library of academic literature. ![]() You must be rather pleased with that newly-published article. Elsevier Authors' Update is pleased to present this article in support of PHD2Published Academic Writing Month.
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