I hope I did it right.

You don’t realize the size of a task it is until you’re about a tenth of the way through it. And then when you reach the halfway point, you realize yet again that you completely underestimated the amount of work and now, you actually have 80% of it left to do.

That was my experience with the Research Article. I knew it was going to be hard. I knew it was going to be a long, grueling journey. But I didn’t realize quite how much. It seemed straightforward. Write the methods. Go redo all the transcriptomic analyses we did in class to really understand what’s going on. Regenerate figures and make further analysis if necessary. Write up the results. Interpret the results. Scour the internet for references. Try to find the one interesting finding that ties up the whole experiment, and then go back and write the introduction and abstract and the title.

Breaking it down step by step made this colossal task seem more manageable. But what I learned while going through this process is that it can’t be simplified to a linear list of steps. No, it’s an interconnected web.  The different sections of the article not just speak to each other, they live and breathe together. A specific result must have an interpretation. There must be sentences explaining why that result is important and how it ties with everything. Then that conclusion must be foreshadowed in the introduction and asserted in the abstract.  A single revision in one place means the whole dynamic of the paper might change. The overall conclusion might shift.

This drove me crazy. It’s so important to maintain a coherent story, to make sure everything tied together nicely in the end. I had to ensure that I was highlighting the most important results and making the right conclusions about them. That my interpretations were rigidly backed by evidence. That my introduction explained all the background information well, but just well enough. That my abstract really captured the essence of the overall study.

And I feel like I did so many things wrong. I’m sure I needed to revise my Research Article over and over for at least a month before obtaining the level of writing the 20.109 instructors were expecting. I really imagined myself writing for an actual journal and tried to hold myself to those standards. I know I have far to go, but at least I’ve gotten the first step down – writing my first research article. Hence, after correcting for my human-error prone estimation skills as best as I can, I’d say I’m about 10% of the way there.