Film and Television Extended Essay Finishing Touches

This document provides guidelines for students completing a Film and Television Extended Essay at the University of Hertfordshire. It details the required formatting for the title page, including the submission statement. The document also explains the purpose and structure of an abstract, emphasizing its role as a summary of the essay's main elements. It advises students to write the abstract after completing the essay, using key sentences from each chapter to accurately reflect the study's argument, methodology, findings, and implications. The document also directs students to examples of abstracts in the module website and academic journals.

Film and Television Extended Essay /Media Report
Finishing Touches
1. Title page protocols
To be typed at the bottom of the title page:
Submitted to the University of Hertfordshire in partial fulfilment of the
requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Art (Honours) Film and
Television Production
2. The Abstract
An abstract is a short summary to tell the reader what the extended
essay is about. It presents the main elements of your essay in a
condensed form.
It is placed immediately following the title page but before the first
chapter,
Supplying an abstract is a common requirement for anything submitted
for publication and is a convention of presenting the extended essay as
a final year under-graduate student in university.
Your extended essay abstract should be around 150-words in length. But
remember, the abstract (and the footnotes and bibliography) are never
included in the total word- count, i.e. the 4000-words required for the
assignment.
It is helpful to think of your abstract as an advertisement for your
extended essay so it is important that the abstract accurately reflects
the contents of the extended essay.
A good abstract gives information about the question under
consideration, the methods for investigating it and the findings of the
enquiry, as well as the implications. A quick test of whether your
abstract does the job is to examine whether your abstract answers the
questions: what? why? how? and so, what?

The clarity of the abstract should not be overlooked because it is this
section of the extended essay that is usually read first. Thus, the abstract
should be written in a way that makes the study seem articulate and
scholarly.
The structure of the abstract should mirror the structure of the
extended essay, and represent all its major elements.
It is relatively easy to put together a good abstract after an extended
essay is completed. You can almost lift two or three key sentences from
each chapter of the extended essay to assemble the abstract, because
the abstract needs to provide an overview of the study's argument,
methodology, findings and implications (avoiding abbreviations and
idiosyncratic terms). It is important to be precise and specific and not
include content that is not present in the extended essay itself.
If, in doubt, look at examples of abstracts available in the TEACHING
RESOURCES section of the module web site, in academic journals via the
UH online library/Google Scholar and follow the formats there!
Kim Walden 2017