Scientific Writing: Cut the Fluff and Write the Facts



Its very startling to think that we are more than one-third of the way done with the semester.  But in what has felt like a short time a lot has been accomplished. From the first day when we went over basic cell culture techniques to on the final days going over statistical significance, it has been a whirlwind trying to keep up and of course, be a good researcher and log everything in Benchling. All the data and methods had to be processed and then spit out into a powerpoint with an abstract and figures.  There were many deliverables and the worst part was these had to be written SCIENTIFICALLY!  

Now you may be thinking, well of course, this is a science class and a CI-M so it should be expected to write as a scientist would.  My response: well I don’t really classify myself as a "scientist" and I have never written anything like a data summary before.  I found myself constantly wanting to add more to make it flow better, but science writing is all about the data and what you are presenting. You want to tell a story but a story with a lot of technical details and not a lot of extra content.  You must cut the fluff and get right down to the nitty-gritty.  The bullet points helped but there were times that I was confusing myself with what was a sentence and what was a cohesive thought, there might have been a time where I reconsidered my understanding of what really is 'a sentence'.  

Overall after I got over my troubles defining a sentence and bullet points, I think I am sort of getting a better sense of “scientific writing” I guess I will get a better idea after getting the data summary back. All in all, I am mentally trying to prepare myself for the daunting module two assignment, the research paper, as I  try to forget the amount of time I worked on the data summary, which was completed with a partner.

Stay tuned if I make it out alive from 20.109.

Anyways here are some memes, as I think I am funny sometimes.






Kylie Gallagher 






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Warning: sentimental post ahead

It’s official - we survived the research proposals ( & I even managed to breathe this time)! To be fair I feel this assignment was really useful for getting practice in how to go about coming up with a research plan. We had to break down a mountain of a problem into a bite sized chunk and come up with a series of practically feasible experiments to tackle the real-world question. It was exciting to listen to everyone’s amazing proposals - I can only imagine what my 109 fam will go on to accomplish in their professional careers! I have thoroughly enjoyed spending time with them all, even when that entails commiserating at 1am in stud 5 about the massive amount of work we have left to do. Some academic environments can be cutthroat but my experience with others in 109 has been anything but. While some friendly rivalry exists between teams to produce the “prettiest” data, all in all it’s amazing how supportive everyone is. From memes and words of encouragement in the group chat, to h...
Read more

A satisfying conclusion to a sometimes exhausting semester

The research proposal process was a lot more work and (eventually) a lot more fun than I expected. Picking a topic was one of the hardest parts. At first, in brainstorming ideas and browsing papers, it seemed that any idea we could propose was either 1) trivial, 2) already done, or 3) unreasonable. I realized how much more difficult it is to come up with novel ideas than it is to read and understand the work that someone else has already done. It sometimes feels as if a field is either so saturated that everything has been tried already or so new that there's no clear direction to head. In thinking about the research proposal, I've come to realize how incremental and non-linear scientific progress often is. After we finally settled on an idea, I really enjoyed diving deeper into the literature. Only after exploring more what experiments have already been performed and models made did I appreciate better the questions that people have asked and are still trying to answer. It w...
Read more

Break it up into pieces

Just finished the Mod 2 Research Article! It was a really long assignment that took a while to complete, but I think I really started appreciating the homework we did along the way when I realized that we had basically already written the Introduction and Methods sections. I then started putting together the figures, and tried to split up the writing into small tasks (ie Results section for sequencing figure) to make it more manageable. Additionally, the teaching staff were very helpful and responsive to all my questions. After putting together a draft, I then read through it once myself and made edits to it, and scheduled an appointment with the CommLab for Monday morning. The grad student I met with this time was extremely helpful; he was able to pinpoint very clearly areas of my article that needed clarification, or were too wordy and needed to be cut down. Following his feedback, I revised my article again, and gave it a few more read throughs before submitting. I definitely think...
Read more