An abstract is a brief (150-300 word) summary of an article or piece of work. Abstracts let readers know what the work is about, know what to expect from the work, and provides enough information for the reader to decide whether they wish to read the entire piece of work. If you use Digital Library resources or perhaps Google Scholar, when you search for material, you will see that the search results often come with a title and abstract. You read the abstract and use that to decide whether you want to read the whole article.
Abstracts appears at the start of a written piece of work and summarise everything that follows. Alternatively, if the work consists of, for example, a presentation or a poster, then the abstract might be presented separately as a stand-alone document.
There are four or five concepts that are included in an informative abstract:
Here's a typical abstract of a research article:
Visual literacy, the ability to interpret, analyse and create visual material, is an increasingly crucial skill for today’s graduates. However, this importance has not yet led to its teaching being widely introduced into the third-level curriculum. This study uses a constructivist and social constructivist approach to introduce a visual literacy element to a business curriculum. This took the form of five projects: creation of an album cover, a poster and artefact presentation, a walk along a river to facilitate learning via visual stimulation, abstract art creation through use of image manipulation software and a photography exhibition. Students responded positively to the projects; self-reported improvement in skills and confidence are in line with results of previous studies. Students also noted the ease of use of PowerPoint as an image manipulation tool.
The first two sentences provide the background:
Visual literacy, the ability to interpret, analyse and create visual material, is an increasingly crucial skill for today’s graduates. However, this importance has not yet led to its teaching being widely introduced into the third-level curriculum.
The next sentence tells you what the researchers did.
This study uses a constructivist and social constructivist approach to introduce a visual literacy element to a business curriculum
Then, how they did the work
This took the form of five projects: creation of an album cover, a poster and artefact presentation, a walk along a river to facilitate learning via visual stimulation, abstract art creation through use of image manipulation software and a photography exhibition.
Finally, the results
Students responded positively to the projects; self-reported improvement in skills and confidence are in line with results of previous studies. Students also noted the ease of use of PowerPoint as an image manipulation tool
No conclusions or recommendations are included here, but they are often included in abstracts.
If someone asked you about your work, how would you answer? You wouldn't give a long-winded detailed response; you'd provide a short summary of what you did, a verbal summary, perhaps. Hence, a good first step in writing an abstract is thinking about what you would say if someone asked you about your work. Your answer will probably be informal, but you can use that as a basis for what will go in your abstract. Answer the following questions as complete sentences (1 or 2 sentences per answer):
Refine the answers as required and think about using transition words to link the different answers.
Some advice:
