Abstracts with life!?!

The purpose of a scholarly abstract is not merely to summarize an article's content but to persuade one's discipline-based peers that the research is important and the article is therefore worth reading. . . . Authors who adopt an impersonal, "academic" tone are neglecting one of the most powerfully persuasive tools at the stylish writer's disposal: the human touch.

Helen Sword, Stylish Academic Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2012),  ch. 13