Figure making taught me how to use powerpoint to make memes







To write my research article, I used a mix of staff help along with people not in the class. When I was done with the rough draft of my research article, I printed it out and read it again. For some reason, this enabled me to read this article more objectively, and less as if it was my writing.

Once this was finished, I gave my article to a friend that has no understanding of anything I was writing about. I asked him to tell me which parts of my paper (barring the methods) didn't seem to be clear enough for an audience with little knowledge about CRISPRi and experimental goals. Because all the people in the class I talked to about the paper along have a solid understanding of CRISPRi and what we used it for, it seemed like it would be useful to get an uninformed person's opinion.

One other resource I utilized in the writing of this research article was office hours. For obvious reasons, the instructors of the course provided the best information on figure content along with what sorts of details to include in the methods section and results. I found talking through my thought process with them for what kind of figures I wanted to make made making every figure a lot clearer and simpler. Additionally, because I don't have much experience writing methods sections, some rules such as when it's acceptable to use volumes are lost on me. Talking with the instructors at office hours helped clear a lot of these rules up.

One thing I also used was my past data summary for module 1. Because the data summary was meant to kind of outline a research paper, I used the techniques I employed in the writing of the data summary to guide my research article writing.

Overall, I now understand why module 2 is regarded as so difficult. The amount of work to collect my thoughts over a experiment where I used data from different groups and different years took a lot of time. Additionally, parts of my writing began to feel very redundant. I feel that I explained the purpose of the same experimental steps multiple times throughout the paper and I'm not sure if I was supposed to or not. The writing itself of the research article wasn't that time consuming but what took a lot of time was planning out what ideas I want to explain and where in the paper. If I were to do this project again, I would probably give myself time throughout the writing process to relax and make the writing easier.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It BE like that sometimes (R)

Image
The hardest part of scientific writing for me is a combination of a lot of different things. Finding the reason for the research that is not too broad (aka, cancer in general), but is also not too specific (glioblastoma, since, while our cells were from glioblastoma, we didn’t directly study this). The implications and future-works section was rough for similar reasons to the background and motivation, but it was slightly easier since it was based off of our own data. Also, compiling information to include in the background and motivation is really rough. I think making the figures and analysis was a little easier, though it was definitely very time consuming. It be like that sometimes I guess. I did enjoy making the figures in MATLAB though! Was a lot of fun for me. Something that really helped our team was making a to-do list of everything that needed to get done. I think this is something I will implement for writing my full research report for Module 2....
Read more

So Many Figures

            When we first chose our journal articles a couple weeks ago I tried to be intentional about picking one that would make a good presentation. I wanted one that I found interesting, and one that would have enough engaging results to fill the full 10 minutes. It was those two criteria that led me to choose the “Directing Cellular Information Flow via CRISPR Signal Conductors”. I found the premise of engineering CRISPR constructs to act at ‘Boolean Logic Gates’ really intriguing, but what I didn’t realize until somewhat later was just how extensive this paper was. Not only did the authors design environment inducible CRISPR sgRNAs they also created three or four variations of this system, tested its responsiveness to a number of different conditions, created six different ‘logic’ gates, and used them to kill cancer cells. In addition to the 6 figures in the paper, there were 36 supplementary figures and 24 supplementary ...
Read more

The difficult part of technical writing

Image
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 & fut...
Read more