Abstract

An abstract is a concise summary of a larger project (a thesis, research report, performance, service project, etc.) that concisely describes the content and scope of the project and identifies the project’s objective, its methodology and its findings, conclusions, or intended results.
Remember that your abstract is a description of your project (what you specifically are doing) and not a description of your topic (whatever you’re doing the project on). It is easy to get these two types of description confused. Since abstracts are generally very short, it’s important that you don’t get bogged down in a summary of the entire background of your topic.

As you are writing your abstract, stop at the end of every sentence and make sure you are summarizing the project you have undertaken rather than the more general topic.

An abstract:

Tells what you would like to do in your paper
tells what your topic is
tells why you chose it
explains how you plan to research it
tells what conclusions will your paper draw or hope to draw
tells what resources will you use.

This information must be in paragraph form, about one to one and a half pages in length.

Because an abstract tells what conclusions your paper will draw, there is some thought that an abstract can only be written after the paper is composed. That is fallacious. A well-thought out paper will show what it hopes to prove; if your conclusions are different after writing the paper, you can note that. That is often commonplace in academic writing.