Data Summary Reflection

Something that surprised me about the data summary was how useful it is to have communication taught to you. I’ve read some scientific papers before and even written some similar pieces of my own, but there are a lot of tips and tricks that were taught to us in this class that made the scientific writing process a lot clearer to me. As someone who likes to think about things in terms of frameworks, being taught about the hourglass layout of an abstract, for example, helped me get a much better idea of how scientific information can be presented in a clear, concise way.

On the other side of things, completing the data summary gave me a better idea of how much effort goes into writing a scientific paper. Each subsection of every figure is the result of a hard worked experiment. Every detail in the caption must be carefully thought out in order to present the results clearly. Creating an introduction section requires extensive research into background literature and creating a discussion section requires more high-level knowledge about the importance of your work. And all of the above require proofreading, revision, and careful thought (lots of it). I now appreciate cleanly written papers much more, and say thank you to whoever taught their authors about scientific communication.

Some other takeaways: I’m hoping to make my crafting of the research paper assignment for Mod 2 a more incremental process, instead of working on all of it in the days leading up to the deadline. Also, getting a lot of feedback on each homework assignment is super helpful towards creating a better end product!

~Lexi