New School Economic Review

Tiss the season to write abstracts – for everyone of us!

by Benjamin on December 12, 2010

I just had a beer with an old friend and a brand new Ph.D. student, and as usual we found ourselves chatting about papers, friends, academia and such war stories, debating which conferences to submit papers to this year. Then I asked our new arrival in academia which conference he was thinking of submitting a paper to. He (coming from a ‘top’ university) quietly said that his fellow Ph.D. students weren’t encouraging on the topic, so being in his first year he didn’t want to make a fool of himself and also he didn’t have a paper ready. Let me stress now that it doesn’t matter what year you are in, nor if you have a paper ready – you only need an abstract to submit a paper for a conference, and if you are a Ph.D. student, you should be writing an abstract and submitting it !

The majority of papers that go to conferences are not written when the abstract is submitted, and some never even make it into a proper script by the conference ! (That’s reserved for the very senior, so I wouldn’t recomment it). Many conferences have young scholar sessions, and most offer a bit of money for travel, while your department is sure to have a conference budget. And you can get some of that money, if you have a paper (read: abstract) ready for the conference. So the key question here is to ask yourself, “where do I want to be in six months with this research?” Write down 250 words which answer how you will get there, and submit it.

Going to conferences means you’ll meet people who are interested in what you do, and who have expert knowledge. Seeing where the discipline is going, finding people willing to read your stuff (because they’re interested) and give you comments and feedback. Fantastic stuff. Chatting up a journal editor over a few beers in the evening is never a bad plan either. So step to it, even if writing abstracts can be hard and there aren’t a lot of good guides out there, but the best tip I’ve seen, is from Joe Wolfe:

An abstract is not an introduction. It is a résumé of your thesis
………………………………………-Joe Wolfe, Uni. of New South Wales

Writing a great abstract

by Benjamin on January 31, 2010

I’ve written quite a few abstracts by now, but after punching out two pages for my PhD, and having a relatively ok response to it, I read the university regulations: The word-limit is 300 words. THREE HUNDRED?? Are they mad, that’s not even a hundred pages per year at this stage – how the &%!£ is that supposed to be… Come on, conference papers usually get 250 words, so an extra 50 because its a Ph.D. Thanks.

So that was my initial panic. Now I remember working on a film-script which took 4 months some years ago, and we got how long to pitch it? 5 minutes. And of those, we only got to talk for 50 odd seconds. But we’d practiced for that – so how to practice this? I guess the story is similar for a book pitch. You want to write 80,000 words, good, but the editors wants to see 300 words that will make them read the whole abstract, excite them and then give you money to do the work. But I’ve never written a book before. With that mind-set I figured there had had to be lots of ‘how to write a great abstract’ papers out there. How wrong I was.

Thus far I have found two pieces of solid advice. The first is now written in big bold red across the header of my abstract, and the second is just below in black italics:

An abstract is not an introduction. It is a résumé of your thesis
………………………………………-Joe Wolfe, U. of New South Wales

More is in vain, when less will serve
………………………………………-René Descartes, 1638

Right. All I have to do is: Explain what I’ve done, how I did it, and the exciting results. Bad news: This blog post is 300 words long. Shit.