 After the basics, what you'll want to do is include just focused content. You want to have just enough information. Make your thesis very, very obvious. People should be able to tell in one glance the findings of your research or the key idea that you're trying to get across. Try to skip details and just keep things simple. People aren't very likely to stand there for several minutes trying to interpret what you've written about, so make sure that it's easy for them to understand right away. Those posters use IMRD format to organize information, especially in the sciences. So that means you start with an intro, you explain the methods you used, you share the factual results of exactly what happened, and then you interpret those results in the discussion section. So that mirrors the format of many essays that you may have written, but you don't want to just copy and paste an essay onto a poster because that doesn't use the strengths of the poster. And what you can do is not include whole paragraphs, change those into short sentences and bullet points, move your citations to somewhere unobtrusive, so either shrink the font size to make them take up less space on your poster, or put them in the handout that you're going to make available to people. And then you also don't want to include fun facts very much, unless they really are crucial to your thesis or your main idea. So entertaining information like that can go really well in your pitch instead. But sometimes if you're assigned a poster for class, you're required to include more text than would be ideal. So what you can do to make it work as well as possible under those circumstances is shift as much text as possible to the handout if you're allowed to do so. You could try stapling an essay to your poster, so all those extra details that might be required, you can compress them into a few pages of paper that, again, take up less space on the poster itself. And you can also play with font sizes, so shrinking the font size of only the citations and other less important information, leaving plenty of space for your key ideas so that people can take it all in in one glance. So here's a strategy to start deciding what belongs on your poster. First, try making a list of all the ideas that you want to convey or that are required by your assignment. When you have that, go ahead and put a star next to the ideas that are really essential. Finally, organize your ideas into three columns deciding if they should go on your poster, in your pitch, or on the handout. If you've already begun your research, you can try this out now even if you're not sure what your results might be yet.