You might be wondering what a RISC abstract is. I’ll get to that later. For now, I’ll just tell you that it’s a mnemonic for properties a good abstract should have.

You will write many abstracts throughout your career: for conference presentations, for papers and for your thesis, as well as summaries for scholarship and grant applications, which are in many ways similar to abstracts. Writing an abstract is easy. Writing a good abstract is an art.

If you’re going to write a good abstract, it’s useful to start by thinking about the purpose of an abstract. An abstract is an invitation, either to come to your presentation or to read your paper. If you think about it that way, then every abstract has to provide certain things to your audience:

• It should be readable to the intended audience. This means that the first thing you need to think about before you start typing is who is going to read this? Who are you trying to invite into your work? What do they know? And just as importantly, what don’t they know? If I’m writing an abstract for an audience of nonlinear dynamicists, then I’m allowed to use the word “bifurcation” without explanation. On the other hand, if I’m writing for a general audience of biologists, I should probably say that a bifurcation is a qualitative change in the behaviour of a system as a parameter is varied. I might even want to give an example relevant to work to be presented. So think about the vocabulary you’re going to use, as well as the conceptual framework that you come from and whether you can take that for granted.
• The abstract should start with the minimal background required (for the audience) to understand the problem that your contribution addresses. As you are providing this background, you should also make it clear why this is an important or interesting area.
• When students start writing abstracts, I find that they often forget the most important thing, at least for a research abstract as opposed to the abstract of a review paper, which is to give the readers an idea of the results of their studies. It is possible, especially for conferences, to write a “teaser” abstract that indicates that you have been working on an important question without revealing what you found. (This is especially handy when you’re writing the abstract six months before the conference…) But that’s an advanced abstract-writing technique that is seldom used well. People are much more likely to come to your presentation or to read your paper if you tell them at least roughly what you have discovered. Statements about the findings help the audience decide if they are likely to be interested.
• For a review paper, your focus should be on clearly outlining the scope of the review. Again, people are much more likely to read your review if they know ahead of time that some topic of interest to them will be covered.

To help you think through the writing of your abstract, I’ve come up with a mnemonic: you want your abstract to be RISC: Readable, Informative, Succinct and Complete. Readability is judged relative to the intended audience. Your abstract should be informative about the content of your presentation or paper. In other words, a reader or audience member should not be surprised by your content after having read your abstract. The word abstract implies that it will be a succinct summary, so avoid padding out your abstract with unnecessary side notes, and tighten up the remaining text as best you can. And finally, it should be complete, providing a bit of background, something about what you did, and a few notes about your results. You will have written a good abstract when, stepping back from it, you find that it is RISC. This takes some practice and, for most of us, a lot of feedback from mentors and colleagues.

If there’s a tricky part, it’s putting yourself in the shoes of your audience. But here’s the good news: because abstracts are short, it’s reasonably easy for someone to say yes to providing feedback on your abstract. And if you’re writing for biologists, or for sociologists, or musicians, you almost certainly know a biologist, or a sociologist, or a musician. So just ask!