The difficult part of technical writing

Technical writing is decently intuitive to me because it is typically divided into discrete sections: the abstract, introduction & background, materials & methods, results, and implications & future work. Excluding the abstract, each section logically leads into the next one without the need for elegant transitions, unlike creative writing.

I typically like to write the introduction first, as it gives me a good idea of what the general goal of the paper is. It helps me to focus my methods section and the rest of the paper to only include material which is necessary for the goal of the study. I like to write the methods section after, as it reminds me of which experiments were important to the study and thus what data I should include in my results section. When I get to the results section, the introduction and methods have given me a good idea of what figures to make and what data to include. This leads me into writing the implications & future work section, where I write about the results.

However, once I have written what happens throughout the study, I still have to complete the abstract. This part is the most difficult for me to write well, because of the amount of information I must get into as little writing as possible. The abstract section is the most important section of technical papers in my opinion, because that is often the only part of an article people will read.

I leave the abstract for last, because once the rest of the paper is written I can look through it and better identify the most important takeaways. I think reducing unimportant parts of the study from the abstract is optimal so when people read the abstract, they can get a good sense of what I was going for with my paper.

Though the data summary was mainly just bulleted points, I think I will take this order of writing when I approach the full research paper in module 2. However, before I start any writing I plan to write a full outline of the paper, so I don’t get as stuck throughout the writing process. Also, one thing that helped me immensely in getting through this data summary was before I began, I created a timeline of what needed to get done and when. I feel that breaking this big project into smaller ones that had very clear end goals made it a lot more approachable and less intimidating.