Scientific writing is hard, but maybe not as bad as I thought?


Since coming to MIT I’ve sort of been dreading the inevitability of writing an actual research article. I’ve had to read plenty of articles, which just reinforced how complicated and long and probably unpleasant to write they were. I’ve still got a few weeks to go until I have to write one of my own, but after Module One and the data summary the task seems a lot less daunting. I was surprised (and relieved) to learn just how formulaic research articles are throughout the Communications Lab presentations, data summary assignment, and group paper discussion. It wasn’t like I thought that scientists just cranked out full articles off their tops of their heads, but breaking down scientific writing into parts and even sentences throughout this module helped me realize that journal articles aren’t monolithic pieces of writing but useful structures that you fill in with your research (like science Mad Libs!). We’ll see how optimistic I’m feeling about science writing the day before the research article is due, though.

In writing the data summary, the hardest part for me may have been the Background and Motivation section. I feel like I spent too much time working on Background compared to the other sections, especially Results and Interpretation, which is the most important. I’d get caught up reading through papers while I tried to track down the perfect citation for information that we’d learned in class, or changing my mind about which information should even be included. Still, writing this section went more smoothly than background information sections I’ve had to write for UROP proposals because of the discussion in class about how the section should be structured.

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