An abstract is a short summary of your study. It is a highly-structured writing exercise. Like a paper, it should contain an introduction, methods, results, and conclusions (although these actual headings are not required). The abstract should be written as a single paragraph. Abstracts have a proscribed length—for the SfN annual meeting, the body of the abstract should be no more than 2,300 characters, including punctuation but not spaces. This makes them deceptively difficult to write, because they need to convey a lot of information in a very small space. If done well, it makes the reader want to learn more about your research. Two example abstracts that incorporate all the key components and meet all the criteria can be found below.