How to Write a GOOD ABSTRACT for Student Papers

hello everyone welcome to the smart student my name is chelsea seaburn today's video is going to be a tutorial on how to write an abstract for student papers now i do have one disclaimer to make before we dive in and it's that under apa 7th edition formatting student papers no longer require an abstract however professors can still ask their students to include an abstract in their college essays and research papers that's right professors can and sometimes will still ask their students to write an abstract when it's no longer officially required which is why i'm making

this video okay great now that that's out of the way go ahead and give this video a thumbs up subscribe if you haven't already and what do you say we dive into the good stuff [Music] so what is an abstract well an abstract is a summary of your paper now most students already know this yet there is still a lot of confusion out there so let me try and simplify this for you i want you to think back to when you were younger and you were in school think back to a time when you were

assigned to read a book that you didn't necessarily want to read what did you do well if you were like most students you probably went online to either cliff notes or spark notes why because these were wonderful resources that took a big long book and condensed it down into a small easily digestible passage that you could read in a fraction of the time but still take away the key plot points and main ideas the reason i bring this up is because your abstract is the cliff notes version of your paper meaning it should read like

a brief summary of your paper not a proposal for what you intend to study or accomplish so as a rule of thumb the abstract is not a place to tell the reader what you're researching go ahead and tell them what you found in your research all right so now that you're clear on the purpose of your abstract let's go ahead and jump into my computer where i'm going to take you through the criteria of a good abstract and then walk you through an example of how to set one up so here we are all right

so what makes for a good abstract well an abstract should contain four different elements you have your objective your methods your results and your conclusion a good abstract is a standalone piece of content meaning it can be read and understood on its own a good abstract should not contain any in-text citations in it because it should focus on your own original thoughts and research not the research of other people it should not be written with future tense language because remember your research has already been done a good abstract is best when it's written last after

the entire body portion of your paper has been written and it should be written in no more than 250 words great now let's go ahead and get into the formatting of writing out that abstract when it comes to the formatting there are two different ways that you can format your abstract either through a paragraph or a structured formatting like you see here the one and only difference between these two is that a structured format contains labels for those four elements where the paragraph formatting does not it's more set up in a long block text type

paragraph formatting is by far the most common so that's the type i'm going to go ahead and demonstrate in this tutorial now this is what a finnish abstract should look like let me take you through the page setup and how you can use those four elements to formulate your abstract the first thing you need to do is go ahead and set up your title page or cover page under apa 7th edition formatting so your document is set up correctly if that's something you need help with be sure to check out this video up here the

abstract should always start on its own page after the title page my pro tip for you here is to use a page break after your title page is finished rather than just hit enter a bunch of times until you reach a new page if you use a page break your text will not move as you type which is really convenient if you have to go back and edit parts of your document later at the first page after your title page you'll want to type out the word abstract in bold in the center the text in

your abstract will begin on the very next line like this for paragraph forming you want to write out your abstract in one long block text paragraph so as a traditional paragraph would be indented inward you would not indent any of the text in your abstract in a long block text like this the only thing that would be indented in your abstract is your keywords if you chose to use those i'm going to cover those later on in the video so for now let's go ahead and finish up with the formatting if you'd like to take

note the page number is included in the upper right hand corner which should have already been set up when you set up the title page of your document your abstract should follow the same double space formatting as the rest of your document and lastly you'll want to ensure that it contains no more than 250 words you can check by hitting command shift c on a mac or ctrl shift c on a pc as you can see here we meet that requirement okay great now let's move on the objective is simply the purpose of your paper

so this section should demonstrate with the theoretical problem or the research question your paper is intending to answer or prove is in the objective section you should provide enough context that your reader fully understands what the purpose of your paper is without going into too much detail a good objective can include brief information of the background it should identify the problem or research question you're addressing and lastly it should state the full objective of your research in this section it's helpful to use verbs like investigate examine test analyze evaluate determine to describe what you'll be

doing in your paper make sure to avoid future tense language because remember you have already done your research so this section right here where it says this paper is going to investigate that's future tense language i'm going to change that to either past tense or present this paper investigates the reason perfect that's much better because it indicates that my research has already been done next is the method section in this section you want to describe the research methods you've used to address or answer your problem in your research question honestly this section should be fairly

straightforward so one to two simple sentences for your methods is plenty as you can see here this sentence clearly states the two research methods that i used in this paper the next section is going to be where you include your results here you want to summarize the main results of your research without again going into too much detail so what you can ask yourself is what did you learn what did you find out or what did you prove you want to maintain the conciseness of your abstract by keeping this section brief because you've probably come

up with quite a few results after your research there's a good chance that you're going to have to narrow down those results to one or two maybe three that are the most important once you're finished with that you can go ahead and move on to the last section which is the conclusion here you want to state the main conclusion or implications of your research so whatever answer you came up with in your theoretical problem or your research question this is where you want to state that as a rule of thumb after the reader is finished

reading your conclusion they should have a clear understanding of the central point of your research that it's either proven or argued now the last section in your abstract is your keywords the purpose of keywords is simply to make your paper more searchable and easily accessible online or in journal databases if you're wondering how to choose your keywords i'd say choose a few words that describe the main topics in your paper for the formatting keywords is indented inward one-half inch the word keywords should be italicized and all of the keywords you include should be written in

lower case unless it is a proper noun like you see this is here in which case you would type it out in capital case where the first letter of each word is capitalized the last thing to note is that there is no sentence punctuation after your keywords since the purpose of keywords is to boost your paper's search ability they are honestly most appropriate for professional papers that are up for publication so most student papers do not need to include keywords and they're abstract again if you have any questions be sure to check with your professor

to see exactly what type of formatting they're looking for all right everyone that's it that's a gist on how to write an abstract for a student paper if you have any questions feel free to drop those down in the comment section below i do my best to respond to as many of you as i possibly can and also if you're still unclear about anything apa related i have a full apa formatting playlist which can be found in a link down in the description below and while you're down there don't forget to join the smart student

facebook group it's a great place for comedian connection especially if you're an online college student right now but anyways if you are still here right now thank you so much for watching as always give this video a big thumbs up if you enjoyed it share it with your friends and of course subscribe for more videos like this every week thank you