Help, I can't shorten my abstract! Oh, yes you can (Part 2 of 2) Abstracts may be the most important part of a manuscript because they are often the only part that is read and used as an information source, and because they are also used by readers and editors to decide whether to read the full article. Abstracts need to be complete, concise, and interesting. This is complicated by strict length and format limitations. This is the second of two articles that show you how to shorten an abstract. The accent of these two articles is on preparing informational and descriptive abstracts for publications, but these considerations also apply to conference abstracts. The first article described how to shorten abstracts by eliminating unnecessary content and using plain language. This second article describes how to use linguistic devices to reduce the word count.