The study examines the systematicity towards the general conventions in writing English abstracts related to Master’s theses in the Slovak educational contexts. The abstract is defined as a concise synopsis of the primary document’s content, encompassing fundamental data concerning the objectives, research methodology, findings, and conclusions of the theses. Nevertheless, the fundamental distinction between two categories of abstracts is predicated on their objective: namely, to provide a description of the content of the thesis (descriptive abstracts), or to provide information on the research conducted by the thesis writer (informative abstracts). This distinction is linked to the use of tenses. Descriptive abstracts present the content in the present tense, while the information on the research requires the use of the past tense.

The present study focuses on the comparison of 20 abstracts written in English, as this is the language in which the students’ Master’s theses were originally written. The qualitative analysis will reveal the systematicity of the students in adhering to conventions appropriate to a specific abstract type. The following comparison will be made between the English versions and their Slovak translations, based on an analysis of the concepts of the two distinctive types.

The final stage of the research will concentrate on the quality of the language required, with particular reference to the use of tenses. It is recommended that the present tense be used when writing descriptive abstracts, and that past tenses be employed more frequently in writing informative abstracts. The achieved data will be presented quantitatively in order to draw partial conclusions on the systematicity of conventions in the abstract writing of Master’s theses.

Keywords: Descriptive abstracts, informative abstracts, Master’s theses, conventions, systematicity.