 Hi everyone! Today we'll be talking about writing abstracts and we'll be giving you a few tips and tricks to writing a good abstract. So the first thing we'll go over today is what is an abstract. And so an abstract is generally a summary of your project, a summary of whatever you're working on. It's usually something very straightforward and to the point a very short paragraph. Describing your project. This is often a brand new piece of writing, so if you already have existing pieces of writing on your project or on your work, this is generally something that you write fresh. It's not something that you copy and paste from whatever you already have and use that as your abstract. However, it is a good idea to use your main body of text to organize your abstract. And we'll talk about that a little bit more as we go further into this presentation. And the purpose of an abstract is to attract your audience, to make them curious, to make them want to come and look at your poster, read your paper, listen to your presentation, basically come over and try to learn more about what you're doing. And these abstracts are usually limited to about 300 to 400 words. However, this can vary depending on the conference you're submitting your abstract to, the journal you're submitting to, your field. There are different things that dictate how long your abstract should be. So just check with your conference, your professor, or with the journal you're submitting to get the specific guidelines. And again, this can vary across disciplines. For example, in certain disciplines, an abstract may consist of a background, a thesis, any conclusion. Well, in others, it may consist of naming a specific subject at the beginning of the abstract, followed by a purpose for conducting the research on this subject and ending with some findings. And so now that we know what an abstract is, why would we want to write an abstract? And so writing an abstract is important because it allows us to describe our work whenever we're attending conferences or submitting a paper to a journal. And so journals and conferences often put together abstract books where they collect all the abstracts of the presentations that will be going on and put them together in one single book to make it easy to find certain presentations and I'll give you some more information on how they do that later in the presentation. And so another reason why we would want to write an abstract is because it's often used as the very first thing that the reader can look at in journals. And so this is a way for a reader to know what information will be presented in the paper and whether this information will be beneficial to them, whether it's what they're looking for, a very quick summary of some of the main findings or maybe some of the main methods. Depending on the type of paper that it is, the abstract will be different. And finally, another reason to write an abstract is it's a way to be able to present your work at conferences. Often conferences will request potential presenters to submit an abstract which is then reviewed and all accepted abstracts are published in an abstract book, as I mentioned earlier. And so this is a way for conferences to find speakers, poster presenters, workshop leaders, things like that. And so now we know why writing an abstract is important and so what goes into an abstract. And so the main elements of an abstract include reasoning. And what I mean by reasoning is why is this problem important? Why is this field important? Why should we care about the work that you're doing or the project that you are presenting on? And so that is followed by the specific problem. So you give a very general opening, very general introduction to the field and that's reasoning followed by a very specific problem or the project scope. And that's followed by some very simple methods and nothing too complicated because in the abstract some very simple methods that you use to address this problem. What did you find? What were your results? Again, very simple because the abstract is often short. Next thing you do is after you've stated your results is what do these results mean? You can hypothesize what you think they mean, try to interpret them. And one of the other components that often go in an abstract are the title. So the title is important because it is likely one of the very first things that the audience will look at. And so your title should be easy to read, simple, nothing complicated, try to avoid jargon because this is often what will call your audience over to look at your abstract. It should include the presenter's name so it should have your name on there if you are the presenting author as well as any co-authors who contributed to the project. And this last one here keywords. So keywords are important because as I was telling you earlier conferences often index abstracts according to subject and how they do this is keywords. And so often conferences will provide an index and in this index the audience can go through and look at keywords and find presentations that are listed under those keywords. So having keywords is helpful in the abstract and having the appropriate keywords is also important. So now we've gone over the key elements of the abstract. We can go through writing the abstract. And so when you're writing the abstract you start with a simple introduction that any scientist in the field can understand. So it's something very general, very broad. This is followed by maybe two or three sentences of more specific material. Something that a scientist within your subfield would understand. And again this is about two to three sentences not too long. The next few sentences again about two or three will be devoted to explaining the problem that is being addressed. What will you talk about in your paper, in your presentation, in your poster? What are you going to tell us? And this is then followed by any main results that you already have as well as a summary of what you did. And again these results are simple and the summary is concise, no jargon, easy to follow. So now that we know the components of the abstract and how you go about writing an abstract, we can go through an example of how you can write your abstract. And the way we recommend you do it is you can use an outline. Use any method that works for you however an outline seems to be pretty easy to do. And so when you have your outline the first thing you want to talk about is you want to give a very general statement about your topic. So as I said before, this is the very first sentence of your abstract. It introduces your topic. It introduces your problem. And you want to do this by using a very general statement, something that is easy for scientists and any people to understand and something that catches a reader's attention, that makes them want to keep reading your abstract and eventually go on to look at your poster or listen to your presentation or read your paper. This is followed by a more specific description of the topic. And by this I mean you're starting with a very general statement that any scientist can understand. This next few sentences again, two or three, consist of describing the specific topic. So if your first sentence is talking about the relationship between two things and their effects on something else then your next sentence where you're providing a more specific description would talk about how one affects the other or how one leads to something else or how they lead to the problem that you're going to be discussing. And then that's when you state what the problem is. So you're giving a general statement introduction. You're giving a little bit more detail about that subfield and then you're going on and just telling us what the problem is. And once you've told us what that problem is then you can go on to tell us what is the current state of the field? What is known? Are the current solutions to the problem? Why are the solutions not good? How does yours address the problem or how is your solution better than the existing ones? The next thing we'll do is you should look at how your field addresses this gap in knowledge and how does this relate back to that general statement? And so you're taking this full circle. You're starting with a very general statement. You are getting more specific. You're giving the problem. You're stating what your findings are and how you're filling the gap in knowledge and then you're taking it back to show how your findings or your new methods, if that's what your project is, is coming up with new methods, then how your new findings or methods help address this general problem and how this relates back to the general statement. Okay, so now that we have this outline here, let's try to write an abstract. And so what I have here is I have a sample abstract and you can find many examples of like these, like this one online. And in this first one, I have color coded the different sections of the abstract and we'll go through and I'll tell you what each section is answering. So the first part we're going to say, why is your problem important? Why is your topic important? And that's what this first part of the abstract here answers and it's one sentence. There is no jargon. It's easy to follow. It's easy to read. It's not too long. And it just gives a general overview about rising sea levels and climate change. And so it gives you a very general overview of what the topic will be and what will be presented in this abstract as well as in the presentation. And so this is followed by a small introduction to the field and so it's bringing in very specific examples. So West Antarctica was brought in the very first sentence so it's brought in again and it gives a more specific example of how floating ice shelves in the ocean contribute to other things and so on and so forth. And so this gives a more specific introduction to the general statement that was given earlier. In this next paragraph we have a statement of what will be covered in this paper, this presentation, this poster and it's talking about what was done. And so here it says that they use words like describe some physical mechanisms and so you know what to expect, what you're going to find and what specifically they're looking at in this paper. And lastly this ends with a short summary of the results and the conclusions. And so we started with very general statement, small introduction, a statement of what will be covered in the presentation, the poster or paper and it ends with a short summary of what was found as well as how this ties back to the general statement. And so we start with it is concluded and there it shows the sentence will show the results or the findings and it ends with why this is important. As shown here in this last statement, mechanisms are poorly understood. And so we started off by again going through with why something is important, the small introduction, what is a current state of the field, what you're doing and a short conclusion as to how your work addresses the gap in knowledge or provides a better method to solving a problem. And so you can use this method as well to write your own abstract, start with an outline. Usually I like to go back and write my paper first and then go back and write the abstract last just because I've already flushed out all my ideas. Everything is out on paper, everything's fresh in my mind and I can go back and write an abstract so that it's easier to tell you what I'm going to write about after I've already written it. And so these are just some tips and tricks to writing an abstract. Hopefully these help you. Like I said before, there are examples online, some really great examples of some really great abstracts. And so hopefully these tips help you out. And thank you so much for your attention.