Writing an abstract for the first time. Easy job?

According to this article, writing an abstract is kind of an easy job, or at least it isn’t as hard as it seems. After all, you just have to include the next five parts in the short paragraph:

  •  Motivation
  • Problem statement
  • Approach
  • Results
  • Conclusions


    • So far so good? Remember that you also have to keep in mind the word count limitation (usually around 150-250) and the fact that the abstract is like the title of an article in the newspaper: It may be the only thing the people ever reads, so it has to be as informative as possible but it also has to remain interesting so the reader will want to see what’s next, or as the author of the cited article puts it:

    an abstract must convince the reader to leave the comfort of an office and go hunt down a copy of the article from a library (or worse, obtain one after a long wait through inter-library loan)

    Since an abstract is so important and it has to summarize an entire paper I ask, is it easy to write an abstract especially when you haven’t written one in your entire life? I don’t think so.