The Problem with Abstracts

I used to belong to a "cystic fibrosis support group" called Shark Tank. And they routinely posted abstracts for studies and then discussed them in earnest.

I wasn't really comfortable with that but I'm new and feeling like I'm the problem. Then I spoke with the late Dr. Andrew Hall Cutler on the phone one day because I knew him online and he was gracious enough to be interested in helping me with my tilting at windmills about my deadly condition.

He was a doctor as in PhD in Chemistry, not a medical doctor. I knew him via a chelation self-help list called autism-mercury.

So he told me because he had a PhD, he had subscriptions to services where he could read the actual study in question. And he told me the abstract isn't reliable as a scientifically accurate synopsis of the study, so either get access to the actual study or skip it.

I breathed a sigh of relief and stopped reading abstracts and stopped trying to figure out what I should think of what they said or whatever.

I've had a high school class in Journalism. In old fashioned journalistic writing for newspapers, the headline should clearly state your main point, the first paragraph should restate it and expand on it in a way that unequivocally communicates your main point in case the brevity of the title is in any way confusing and additional paragraphs should add new details.

That's not how all "introductory" material works. 

Movie titles and movie trailers intentionally do not want to give you the "main point" of the movie. They are intended to be teasers that give you some vague idea of the story and intentionally obscure any meaty emotional epiphany or whatever. So in some sense, it's the opposite. They intentionally obscure important details.

Click bait headlines and click bait pieces on the Internet make me completely crazy because they typically give you a hook that makes you want to know the rest of the story and they will not answer it until very late in the piece, but not reliably the very last paragraph where you can just scroll down and easily find it.

The goal of such writing construction is to keep you on the page as long as possible and I absolutely hate that shit. If your writing is any good, I'll stay and read or come back later if I don't have time right now.

These are NEVER good pieces of writing where you hang on every word until you finally find the detail you want to know that sucked you in. They are consistently TRASH articles that are torture to read at all while they toss out additional teasers every step of the way for maximum aggravation.

Abstracts are theoretically supposed to be something akin to the first paragraph of a professionally written journalistic article but that requires writing skills the scientist who did the study may not have and scientific knowledge the hack underpaid freelance writer who wrote the abstract probably won't have.

And then we wonder why the Internet has gone to hell and people are dying of COVID-19.