Mod 1 reflection or how I learned to write scientifically-ish
Scientific writing was a new beast for me. I learned really quickly that taking down this beast would not be very easy. In fact, I dare say it beat me down to absolute submission.
In all seriousness, learning how to write scientifically has a large learning curve for me. Like a really large learning curve. Like Jupiter sized. Like the shame I bring to my family and lab partner sized. However, I think I made some progress. I felt that all of the sections had their own challenges. The abstract, for example, I felt was a balancing act of having the background, results, and future implications while maintaining the right amount of jargon. Meanwhile, for captions and methods there was balancing act of including just the right amount information where it's not too vague, but not overwhelmingly gratuitous. Every sentence has to be precise. Balance. That seems to be key to scientific writing. Just dry enough to bore anyone reading to tears, but interesting enough to give hope to your readers to keep going. Who knew writing in such a boring sterile style was so hard. JK. It's kinda necessary given the nature of scientific writing.
Overall, I'm glad to have learned a lot and survive this class after getting the flu and pneumonia. I learned that there is a certain art to making figures, everything from the captions to using which type of graphs. Everything has to be deliberate, much to my dismay (I'm a terrible artist). For the next module, I hope to start putting more efforts in the beginning, as the days before the data summary due date was pretty wild. I really don't want to put my lab partner or myself through that again. Here's to Module 2.
-Thomas
In all seriousness, learning how to write scientifically has a large learning curve for me. Like a really large learning curve. Like Jupiter sized. Like the shame I bring to my family and lab partner sized. However, I think I made some progress. I felt that all of the sections had their own challenges. The abstract, for example, I felt was a balancing act of having the background, results, and future implications while maintaining the right amount of jargon. Meanwhile, for captions and methods there was balancing act of including just the right amount information where it's not too vague, but not overwhelmingly gratuitous. Every sentence has to be precise. Balance. That seems to be key to scientific writing. Just dry enough to bore anyone reading to tears, but interesting enough to give hope to your readers to keep going. Who knew writing in such a boring sterile style was so hard. JK. It's kinda necessary given the nature of scientific writing.
Overall, I'm glad to have learned a lot and survive this class after getting the flu and pneumonia. I learned that there is a certain art to making figures, everything from the captions to using which type of graphs. Everything has to be deliberate, much to my dismay (I'm a terrible artist). For the next module, I hope to start putting more efforts in the beginning, as the days before the data summary due date was pretty wild. I really don't want to put my lab partner or myself through that again. Here's to Module 2.
-Thomas
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