There’s real competition in the race to be named academic abstract of the day. The titles of the two leading competitors alone should give you some idea of the difficulty in choosing between them:
1) “Social Category Salience Moderates the Effect of Diversity Faultlines on Information Elaboration”
2) “‘I don’t f***ing care!’ Marginalia and the (textual) negotiation of an academic identity by university students”
The prose within the abstracts is equally compelling. Parse the perfection of this sentence: “In line with our hypotheses, social category salience moderated the effect of faultline strength on elaboration.” Now, try to say it is not surpassed by this: “Drawing on discourse analytic concepts such as ‘footing’ and ‘stake’ this article seeks to understand what student marginalia can tell us about the ways in which the tension between ‘doing education’ and ‘doing being a student’ is managed and negotiated in sites other than the university tutorial.”
I’m at a loss to choose. Go here and here to read the full abstracts. And then come back and give me some help.
John Mecklin, writer/editor 