About the MeetingThis year the Annual Meeting off the German Society of Travel Medicine took place in Bremerhaven, September 16th to 18th. This traditional harbour town where thousands of Germans were embarking hundred years ago facing an uncertain future, the so-called “climate house” (an exihibtion about several aspects of the world’s climate) and the Alfred-Wegener Institute for Arctic Research were a fantastic setting for the meeting’s motto “traveling under extreme conditions”. After a brillant introduction by Stefan Kröpelin about research in the Sahara two weeks away from the next pharmacy and a fascinating lecture by Eberhard Kohlberg how to organize expeditions to Antarctica and how to work and to live there several lecturers illuminated a wide field of travel medicine in more or less extreme conditions.
The current study represents an initial approach to the analysis of the textual macro and microstructure, which deals with the Text unit, not only following traditional criteria of textual description applied by Beaudegrande/Dressler (1981), but also according to the postulates of the valency theory. The study of the textual description under the previously mentioned parameters will be applied in this research to the Abstract textual type, which will be followed by a contrastive study of the obtained results.
Writing abstracts, both in a professional and academic environment, is a crucialskill, reflecting the ability to think synthetically and express thoughts in a concise way. Due to the rising popularity of indexing scientific papers in different databases, abstracts can determine the readability of a paper and its future quotation rate. This paper presents the results of an analysis of the microstructure of 40 abstracts from prestigious impact factor medical and economics journals, offering guidelines for designing abstract writing exercises in foreign language courses for specific purposes