For many conferences, grants, journal articles, and even your thesis, you will be expected to write an abstract, a short text that briefly summarizes the research in terms of method, results, and implications. These abstracts vary widely in terms of requirements but are often between 200 and 500 words. Here are some guidelines that are good to follow in writing any abstract.

•  Your abstract should state your research question(s) as clearly as possible.
•  You must highlight the data you plan to use, including a brief discussion of your data collection, analysis, and processing methodologies.
•  You will want to situate your work within a specific theoretical framework.
•  While many people write abstracts before actually doing the research, this is not preferable. The best abstracts include a discussion of the results (fully, not “Preliminary results indicate…”) and any implications those results might have for further research, society, etc.

LSA abstracts:

The Linguistics Society of America (LSA) provides "model abstracts", based on the specific guidelines for the LSA annual meeting: https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/model-abstracts.

Additional resources:

• http://www.wikihow.com/Write-an-Abstract
• https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/essays/abstract.html
• https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/656/1/
• https://www.editage.com/insights/a-10-step-guide-to-make-your-research-paper-abstract-more-effective