How to Write an Abstract

Allison Luedtke has tweeted about how to write an abstract. The basic idea: Instead of sitting down to write "the abstract of your paper"----ie, the most important part, the only thing that most people will read, the culmination of years and years hard work----you just sit down to answer four simple question. Much, much better right? 

Question 1: What is the big picture motivation? 

Question 2: What do you do? 

Question 3: What do you find?

Question 4: What do we know now that we didn’t know before?

See the twitter thread for more details, but if you just answer the questions as quickly and simply as you can without trying to make it sound fancy, you'll probably make a lot of progress. The important bit: Abstracts get rewritten a ga-zillion times, so don't worry at all about writing your first one. It will be rewritten anyway. You can probably answer those four questions lots of different ways. Write them all down, maybe in a notebook vs. in the paper itself. See which sounds most compelling. 

P.S.

Yes, I wrote this tweet with job market paper writers in mind, but if there are any second or third years out there, you can start practicing now! Yes, you may not be ready to write your actual abstract just yet. My advice to prepare: when you read papers for your field courses, see if you can answer those four questions from reading just the abstracts. The more practice you have with going from abstract to answering those questions, the easier it will be for you to go from the answers to the questions to the abstract when it comes time for you to do this for your own work.