Mod1 Reflections

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

I hate making figures,

And I bet you do too.

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The utmost respect goes to those who can write good figure captions. For whatever reason, it always takes me a long time to write a caption, and more than a couple iterations to make it half-decent. I really hope this is one of those things you get better at with practice, because if I am going to be spending 4-5 hours on a tiny figure every single time, science might not be my thing. Maybe though, caption-writing is just the fruit of a large tree; perhaps, the ability to write concisely about science is imperative for making good captions in a reasonable amount of time. Writing concisely had not been an issue for me before. I remember back in the day when I had to write essays, my final draft would always be very close to the word minimum, and not even because I was too lazy to write more--I genuinely did say all that I needed to say in the minimum word count. However, to me science writing is much more difficult. Not only do diction and decent overall writing skills matter a lot, but you also have to genuinely know what you are writing about. In my opinion, it is very difficult to fake an understanding of a science concept. Unless you have a good understanding of the concept, you will struggle to include enough/exclude enough details for others to understand it. On the flip-side, lack of communication skills can make you appear like you have a poor understanding of the concept. This is not unique to science writing though.

I think pre-lab discussions help very much with understanding the concepts. Likewise, I also think that the dense homework assignments--as much as I dread doing them sometimes--could be very helpful to the development of our science writing skills in the long run. 

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Until next time!

-Pedro