An abstract is a critical component of your academic writing. Similar to a movie trailer, the abstract highlights the key points of your essay, assisting the reader in determining the essay’s applicability to their needs.
Therefore, you must learn how to write a dissertation abstract to draw the reader in and emphasize the key points of your research papers. To help you create an excellent dissertation with the least amount of effort, this document will emphasize the guidelines for writing an abstract for a dissertation.
What is an abstract in a dissertation?
A research paper’s abstract is a succinct description of the main research questions, research strategies, findings, and implications. Thus, the dissertation aids a reader in assessing the contribution of your article to their research issues and gauges how well it will be received by the target audience.
Tips for writing a dissertation abstract
- Write the abstract after writing your paper
Writing your abstract without writing your paper brings about space for error, omission of relevant facts, and the inclusion of irrelevant ideas. It is thus best to save your abstract for last to better capture the relevant ideas in your abstract.
Doing this will ensure that you don’t leave important information out, thus communicating the key ideas of your paper to the reader.
- Clarify the problem and solution
Like you, a lot of people conducting research are looking for publications that address a certain issue or present a solution to their difficulties. To help readers determine whether your article is relevant to their needs, your abstract should make the research challenge and the main results of your paper evident.
The key ideas in the introduction and conclusion could serve as the foundation for your abstract in this situation. This method makes it simpler to draw attention to the primary research topic and to accurately summarize the significant findings.
- Tackle the methods and research
Another crucial thing to tackle in your abstract is the methodology of your research. by highlighting your research methods, you allow the reader to determine the relevance of your paper.
- Highlight the key findings
The key reason why people read your abstract is to determine the conclusion you reached regarding a research problem. The findings should take a huge portion of your abstract, with the key findings that relate to the main research question getting the most emphasis.
- Develop an outline
An outline is an important tool in writing an abstract for a dissertation. The outline helps you gauge the information within your outline and to organize various ideas in a manner that ensures a coherent flow within this section.
Also, the outline helps you gauge the word count range of your abstract, therefore making the necessary adjustments to ensure that your abstract does not exceed the 200-to-300-word range.
- Write your abstract
After developing your outline, write your abstract while paying note to the word use. Ideally, use concise sentences to communicate your ideas, to ensure that each key idea that defines your essay fits within your abstract.
It is also important to note that references are not allowed within the abstract of a Ph.D. dissertation.
- Review
The final step in writing your abstract is to review the abstract and ensure that it captures all the relevant information. You could consult experts and your peers in gauging your abstract to receive insight on the necessary changes needed to improve your abstract.
We also recommend that you look at multiple abstract example dissertations to improve your mastery of writing an outstanding dissertation abstract.
Final take
Writing an abstract is often a challenging task for many students, a testament to the challenge is the huge number of students looking to buy dissertation abstracts online. The tips in this article should come in handy to help you overcome any challenges you experience when writing your abstract.