on an abstract roll-a-coaster

I've just completed an abstract for a conference I'm going to in  Lille, France in September. I've already written a proposal which was accepted and now I had to complete a 'summary' of 1000 characters, including spaces...Huh? That's about 130 words - I whittled that thing down to nothingness and sent if off to a colleague to proofread as the scientific committee for the conference made it very clear that it is my personal responsibility to to "thoroughly control the linguistic quality of the summaries". I don't think I will do a good job at linguistic quality. Next up is to write an abstract for a Work-in-Progress Seminar (WIPS) I'm doing in April when I get back from South Africa. It is run internally within the research group (CREET)  I belong to at the OU. At least I'm not confined by a minuscule character limit and I have a sexy working title "Constructing conceptual frameworks: An idiosyncratic exploration". The presentation is aimed at my peers although an increasingly disturbing trend has resulted in loads of supervisors, professors and 'others'  more qualified than the presenters, generally, turning up, for what is meant to be a friendly and supportive presentation environment. I'm not sure how friendly it can be when a famous professor comments on the tardiness of your citation practices. Nevertheless, the work-in-progress theme, along with the mostly friendly overtones of the event, means that I can be fairly liberal with the descriptions of the presentation in the abstract and then tie things up more firmly when the presentation actually takes place. Well this is the plan anyway. Although knowing me, nothing will be dealt with in a liberal, matter of fact fashion, irrespective who the audience might be.