Writing an Abstract
All applications for presentations must include an abstract and confirmation your supervisor has approved your application and has confirmed that it has passed through any relevant ethics processes. Your abstract will be used by the conference organisers to select presentations that are suitable for the Conference, so it is worth taking time to think about your abstract before you write and submit it.
Writing an abstract can often seem challenging. It can be difficult to condense your whole project and research into just 200 words. You should try to keep in mind, however, the purpose of an abstract: to give a concise summary of your research, alongside with some key information, to an audience that may not know anything about your research area.
Your abstract should be no more than 200 words (excluding references) and should include five principal areas.
- Your title. Give your presentation a title. Make it clear, short and to the point.
- Your research question. Give a clear statement of what question your research seeks to answer.
- Your method. Indicate how you seek to answer your question, i.e., your methodology. Are you drawing on any particular sources or data? Are you using any particular approach to your analysis? Methods vary enormously by discipline.
- Your findings. What does your research show? It might be a little too soon to share all your main findings (results), but if you have initial findings this will be interesting and you might also wish to share any hypothesis (assumptions) you have at this stage.
- The significance of your research. What are the implications of your research? These might be ‘real world’ implications or implications for future research.
If you need to, you can include any references at the end, using any reference style suitable for your discipline. Try to present your research in clear language which will be accessible to a non-specialist audience. Your abstract will be published on the website and so provides conference participants with information about your project and the content of your presentation. Write clearly, and succinctly, check your spelling, avoid long sentences with lots of definitions and extensive references. Try asking a friend (outside your discipline) to read it and give you some feedback before you submit.
As part of your application we ask for you to provide 3 keywords relating to your research. These should represent the content of your presentation, and will be used to index your presentation.
Subject specific websites, which support writing an abstract:
- Sciences
- Arts, humanities, and social sciences: How to write an abstract and conference abstracts.
About your Presentation
Plan
Plan what you want to communicate about your research.
There’s a difference between conducting your research, and communicating that research to an audience. In general, you might want to think about your communicating your research as making clear to the audience:
- What question you are asking. (Research Question)
- Why that question is important. (Relevance)
- How you have attempted to establish an answer. (Method and Argument)
- Where you’ve arrived in your attempt to answer the question – your conclusion, if you’ve reached one, or your current position, if you’ve not. (Conclusion or Current Position)
- How this research should impact future research or real world practice. (Significance)
Remember that the UG Research Conference is a multidisciplinary conference, so the way you tackle each of these points should be suitable for a general audience.
Produce
Produce your research poster.
You will be producing an online research poster which summarises your research. Think very carefully about what the most important points under (a)-(e) to get across to your audience are. You can’t communicate everything about your research – and there’s no way to transplant the detailed knowledge from inside your head into the audiences’. That isn’t the goal.
Think about the ‘key messages’ you’d like them to take away, how they can be best communicated, and focus on generating interest in those. Don’t cram your poster too full – cutting is often very difficult, but you have to be ruthless in focusing on what your audience needs to hear about your project, rather than what you want to say. Your poster can contain text, diagraphs, pictures, links, and videos, so you can think creatively about how best to get your points across.
Take care over the formatting and consistency of style. Write simply. Try to read your words out loud – that’s often the best way of catching mistakes. You can add references to your poster, and a bibliography, to help your audience ‘find out more’.
Prepare
Prepare your research talk, if you are intending to give a talk at the event.
Most of you will decide also to give a talk at the Conference. As with the poster, you should think carefully here about the audience, who won’t necessarily be familiar with your discipline.
Think about how you signal what are your really central messages and what are merely points of interest – and try to make that clear to the audience. Be mindful about what an audience can be expected to follow. If you can get across 2-3 points very clearly and generate interest in learning more about your research, you will have been successful. Time spend at the beginning giving a brief ‘map’ of the talk won’t be wasted.
Think again in terms of how to communicate (a)-(e) above. In your talk, you should try and use non-technical language. You might like to design a PowerPoint to accompany your talk and make clear its structure, and finish by inviting the audience to view your poster for more information.
Practice
Practice giving your talk.
Make sure you have a sense of how to summarise your (a)-(e) above within the timeframe. Try not to ‘cram’ things in, and avoid the temptation to try and get extra information in by speaking quickly.
Give yourself a few trial runs, ideally in front of friends or family who aren’t familiar with the technicalities of your discipline. Can they follow well enough to formulate question afterwards that show they’ve really understood? If not, you may wish to simplify your presentation.
Simply things like introducing yourself well, eye contact, smiling, and natural pauses/pitch variation can go a long way to relaxing your audience and helping them become more receptive to the points you make.