A comparison study on the rhetorical moves of abstracts in engineering master and PhD best thesis

Writing clear and informative abstracts is critical. Abstracts are the first thing audience sees before they read the research. This is true for both thesis and research. Therefore, this paper draws attention to the rhetorical moves found in engineering Master and PhD best thesis abstracts. The sample of the study is six thesis abstracts, three PhD and three Master selected from the best thesis award recipients of Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP). All the thesis are from the engineering discipline and are written in English. The corpus size is 2706 words. The study uses Move analysis guided by CARS Model (2004). It also utilizes three type of analysis namely, frequency count (presence of Move), word count (percentage representation of Move) and Move and step list structure. The findings of the study show that Move 3 is the most utilized Move in these abstracts. Move 3 is present in all of the theses and it represents 81% of the abstract word count in PhD abstracts and 79% of Master abstract. The Move step analysis indicates that PhD thesis abstracts shows a longer and more iterative step list compared to Master thesis abstracts. The finding can be used by instructors for teaching abstracts writing based on best practice and from a more personalized perspective taking into account the discipline and cultural variation of the abstracts.