How to Write Informative Abstracts

Once you are through researching and writing a report, you may be bored by your subject and eager to submit the manuscript for publication. After working night and day on a project, it is a relief to forget about it for a while. If you have not written an abstract for your report, however, you may have a sudden mood shift, like someone who has slammed a new car into a brick wall after driving it off the showroom floor.

Exhausted by your topic, you may feel the urge merely to retype the major transitional phrases and headings in your report and call that the abstract. Though understandable, such an approach is foolhardy. Take this warning from a former fool: act as if you have all of eternity to revise your abstract. Although it is usually the last section written, the abstract is the most important element of many academic documents. Readers frequently scan abstracts to determine whether a document is worth reading.

Informative abstracts provide readers with an accurate understanding of the gist of a report, including, for example, a statement regarding the significance of the subject, a review of the methodology used and limitations found, important results, discussion of results, and recommendations. Because abstracts are brief, usually less than a page long, they include only the specifics necessary to highlight essential information.

Abstracts must be able to stand alone as independent mini-reports because they are often torn from their context – that is, the report proper--and reprinted in computerized databases and printed indexes (such as Chemical Abstracts, Dissertation Abstracts, etc.). Because of this need to stand independently, you should eliminate references to authorities cited, tables and graphs illustrated in the report, obscure abbreviations, and jargon.

While you generally want the abstract accurately to reflect the tone of the report, you should remember that even technical audiences enjoy being eased into a complicated topic. Many abstracts fail because the authors have lost perspective of their audience and subject. After spending the majority of their free time researching and writing a study, authors understandably may assume that everyone is familiar with the significance of the subject, with technical terms and abbreviations, and with a methodology. Such assumptions can be quite deadly, however, because they lead to impenetrable prose.

Because the abstract makes you focus on what is important, you may find it useful to write an abstract for all of your academic projects. Writing abstracts can provide a powerful way of reevaluating your logic and of defining purpose. Even if you are not required to present an abstract at the beginning of a report, you will still need to summarize the gist of your document when you write a query letter.

Looking over your subject to see what disciplinary assumptions are challenged, questioning the significance of your ideas, emphasizing the important results, addressing limitations in a realistic manner – these activities are essential to helping you separate the wheat from the chaff. In addition, when you work to summarize your report in a sentence or two, you often gain a firmer hold, a tighter perspective, on the nature of your work.