Writing the poster text

As mentioned previously in Creating Research Posters, content for research posters typically consists of text and images. This section focuses on putting together the text for your research poster, and provides tips for making sure your text is ready to be inserted in your poster.

Text for a research poster is typically written like an abstract for a paper that will be published in an academic journal, but the text for a research poster will be more structured than a typical abstract. You don't want to include the entire text of your paper in your poster — this will result in too much text on the poster, and make it harder for viewers to quickly read through your poster. However, if your poster text is written up like an abstract, summarizing the important information from each section of the paper, it'll be easier for viewers to read through quickly. If you like, you can bring copies of your full paper to a poster presentation to hand out, so interested people can read through the entire research paper if they like.

Instead of taking your completed research paper and editing it down to a lower word count, it's a good idea to write your poster text from scratch. This will help the text flow better in your poster, and eliminate the need for excessive editing of your original paper. When writing the text for your poster, you'll want to make sure that everyone can understand the content. This means you'll want to avoid using jargon — or, vocabulary specific to your field — to make sure that readers don't get confused by technical terms they may not be familiar with. If you must use jargon, you should define it (preferably immediately after the word is used) so readers can understand its use.

Discipline-specific structure information

For different disciplines, there are different structure guidelines for research poster. While many poster sessions focus on STEM disciplines, there are also sessions that focus on humanities-related research as well. Following are guidelines for structuring STEM and humanities posters.

Tips for writing your poster text

It's a good idea to write your poster's text before you lay out your poster, so you have an idea of the tone you're trying to set with your writing and have an idea of the amount of text you'll be including in your poster. It'll also make things easier when you bring the text content into your poster, as some page layout programs allow you to directly import text documents into the layout. Having the text written ahead of time will help save a little time - even if you can't directly import the text into your file, you can still copy and paste from the document containing the poster's text.

When writing your poster's text, you should use a word processor (such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs) to create the text instead of typing the text directly into the poster file. Word processors have more advanced grammar and spell-checking tools than page layout programs do, and writing the text in a separate program will allow you to focus on writing the poster's content without worrying about the layout. 

The length of your poster text should be between 600-800 words, and no longer than 1000 words. Keep in mind that people will want to read through your text quickly — and remember, you can always provide full copies of your research paper for those interested in learning more.

Once your text is complete, make sure you proofread and spell check it to make sure there aren't any errors with your finished product. If possible, have someone else read through your poster text as well, to check that you haven't missed any possible issues.

For assistance with writing poster text, check out WikiHow's how-to guide for writing paper abstracts. Again, keep in mind that poster text should be more structured than an abstract.