A Call for Accessible Scientific Writing

Two days before journal club I realized I had absolutely no clue what was going on in my paper. I understood the overall purpose and the hypothesis that the researchers had set, but could not decipher how they inevitably came to their final conclusions. I blamed myself immediately. I obviously was incapable of reading a scientific paper. That day, as I grew more and more frustrated and reread the paper over and over again, a friend shared a tweet with me that made me feel significantly better. The tweet discussed that we shouldn't necessarily blame ourselves when not understanding academic papers, because many times the author is to blame for poorly communicating their ideas.

After setting up a meeting with Leslie and doing a lot of external research on plant genetics, I finally had somewhat of an idea of what my paper was proposing. Eventually I just started working on the powerpoint and hoping things would connect as I made slides. Surprisingly they did. I was able to figure out what exactly was confusing me and what leaps the authors made that were faulty. I was able to properly organize my thoughts and target information that I needed to look into.

By the time I presented, I was a lot more confident in the article and because of the number of times I read over the paper, Q&A was not nearly as scary as I expected it to be. I actually kinda liked journal club.

Overall, the presentation wasn't the hardest part of this assignment; preparing for it was. This being said, I'm proud of my struggle. I now feel confident enough in doing a journal club on my own rather than with a co-presenter like I have in the past. I also learned a lot about scientific writing and being a better written communicator. If I hadn't been registered for this paper, I would have very quickly switched to another one because of sheer difficulty of understanding it. As a researcher, that's very disappointing to know that work I was proud of was not being taken seriously because of poor delivery. For that reason, I am more driven to become an effective communicator this semester. I want my research to be accessible to the masses and don't want readers to experience the same amount of helplessness I felt at points when reading the paper I was presenting on. I hope to continue to make my writing readable and accessible for the masses.


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