I don't know how to write for science

Coming in to 20.109, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t have any wet-lab experience, other than the usual basic pipetting and assay skills from science classes in high school. I’d also never taken a CI-M before, and had no idea what the “communication intensive” element would bring. I quickly learned that wet-lab work was not as daunting as I’d come to believe, but the communication part was going to be really challenging. I’d always focused on translating scientific language in to regular language for papers and other assignments, and had never had to come up with my own way to write for a data summary.

That was the most difficult part for me - I knew, theoretically, what I wanted to say (or should say) in a given section because it had been essentially worked to death during lecture and pre-lab discussions, but when it came to actually phrasing the sentences, I kept drawing blanks. The relative lack of flow between sentences and paragraphs was confusing, because everything felt so blunt and repetitive. It was the least intuitive piece of writing I’ve ever done. I often gave up, frustrated, and just left it for later, something that ended up biting me when later finally came and my lab partner and I had to actually finish the data summary and hand it in - there was a lot to write. By the end, although still not natural by anyone’s definition, the writing was a lot easier and I found that I could construct sentences and willfully ignore the amount of weird starts and stops. In terms of how I’m going to approach my own research article this module, I’ve realized that I just need to write something down and stop leaving it for later. It is so much easier to edit something than to remember what I thought I wanted to write last week when I actually did that part of the experiment. With this in mind, I am emotionally preparing myself for the mod 2 research paper and trying to acquire as much good karma as possible.