The ability to promote research work is an effective form of communication that belongs to one of the 21st century skills. The present paper aims to explore the assumption that technically oriented students are capable of effectively promoting their research work. As the abstract is the first text to be read to ascertain whether the thesis is worth reading, it must be carefully elaborated in order to attract readers. It is widely acknowledged that students specialising in technical disciplines are expected to demonstrate a high level of proficiency in their chosen field of study, with the aspiration of becoming future professionals in their respective domains. However, it is equally crucial to emphasise the significance of cultivating the ability to effectively promote one’s work, mainly in English as the lingua franca for technical documentation. In order to test three questions related to the topic, a qualitative analysis of the students’ competence in this area was conducted. The aim was to investigate whether students who completed their technical studies with honours were more proficient in writing abstracts in English than students who completed their studies without honours. A total of 28 abstracts were subjected to qualitative analysis, with 14 of these representing a corpus containing the performances of students who graduated from the Slovak Technical University with honours, and the remaining 14 abstracts representing the performances of students who graduated without honours. The paper presents qualitative analyses, and the quantitative comparison of achieved data.