Dr Megan Wang (née Kelleher)

Winter and early spring is the time of year where many speakers begin to apply to attend conferences, and it is often in these settings that we are expected to include in our applications an abstract of our presentation topic. In this blog, I hope to provide some easy-to-follow guidance on how to write an effective abstract. As someone who has attended and organised countless conferences and lectures, I am really familiar with expectations from an abstract now, so I hope these tips will help you.

Generally, you’ll be likely expected to write an abstract of between 2 and 300 words; this may sound like a lot, but once you get into the flow of writing you may find you’re actually having to edit down words rather than find more! Therefore, I would suggest that you break your abstract down into three paragraphs; the topics included in these are:

Paragraph 1: Context

Your opening paragraph is going to be what gets the conference organisers interested. In your first paragraph, make sure to pique their interest by explaining what your topic is about and place it within the wider context of why it is relevant to that particular event. For example, for a First World War conference I may write “The commemoration and care of war dead is a prevalent area of research within the field of First World War studies, but little has been written on the subject of the commemoration and care of First World War dead buried in the United Kingdom. The author’s research seeks to address this gap, and in the talk will consider why these stories are omitted from the rituals surrounding Remembrance practices in Britain.”

Paragraph 2: Argument

Without giving every piece of your topic away, try to give the reader the opportunity to understand what you hope to say. This should include your methodology and how these findings will be presented. In this paragraph, it is important to highlight precisely why your paper matters; is it providing a contrary argument to the current scholarship, or perhaps it’s using data or methodologies not previously used in other similar studies. You are the expert in your area of study – make sure you highlight this here!

Paragraph 3: Conclusions

In your final paragraph, it is important to share some conclusions but leave the reader wanting more. Explain what you hope to achieve from attending the conference and presenting this paper, but also tease that what you have outlined so far is just a tip of the iceberg. This will largely be reiterating what you have said elsewhere (don’t do the cardinal academic sin of bringing new ideas into a conclusion!) but summarise it in the short sentences you have left.

This is a really brief guide of how to write an abstract, but it is a way that I have found immensely effective when writing them. Let me know your thoughts, or if you feel I have missed anything!