Summary
In scientific writing, an abstract summarizes an experiment.

Abstracts

An abstract is a written summary of an experiment or other paper. A browsing reader who reads only the abstract should have a pretty good idea of what the experiment was about. In scientific writing, you should know about the following two kinds of abstracts:

Descriptive Abstracts

A descriptive abstract summarizes a proposed experiment. A descriptive abstract should contain the following two parts:

  1. One or two sentences to describe the problem you are investigating.
  2. One or two sentences to describe your experimental method.

 

Example
Hurricanes ravage populated coastal areas almost every summer causing widespread casualties. Our team proposes to reduce the intensity of hurricanes by dropping silver dioxide crystals into the eye wall.

 

 

Informative Abstracts

An informative abstract summarizes a completed experiment. An informative abstract should contain the following four parts:

  1. One sentence to describe the problem you investigated.
  2. One sentence to describe your experimental method.
  3. One or two sentences to describe the results.
  4. One or two sentences to describe conclusions.

 

Example
Hurricanes ravage populated coastal areas almost every summer causing widespread casualties. Our team attempted to reduce the intensity of hurricanes by dropping silver dioxide crystals into the eye wall over a 12-hour period. During that period, aircraft instruments detected a 17% reduction in maximum wind speed and a 16 mb. rise in central air pressure. After another 24 hours, hurricane strength returned to the pre-seeding level. The team calculated a 75% chance that seeding caused the deintensification.