The hardest part of scientific writing for me is…

After completing the Module 1 Data Summary, I definitely found that writing some sections of a scientific "paper" were harder than others. For me, I consistently thought that the Results section was the easiest and most enjoyable to write. This was partially because throughout the practice we did in Mod 1, I started really enjoying making figures for our results, and it was a very natural workflow to consolidate a group of results in my head, make a figure summarizing them, them enumerate them out with each figure. I definitely think the organization of the Results in the Data Summary, where our results were presented "by figure" (i.e. one figure per slide), will help me organize my results in the research paper for Mod 2, since that was a new and helpful way to approach presentation of results. I also think, when considering all of the sections of a research paper, that my relative strength is presenting data, whether it be numeric or qualitative, so the Results section was the easiest to write up for me.

Even though Methods were not included in our Data Summary, from the homework assignments, I thought it was a really tough section to write, since it takes some practice to get a feel for how much or how little detail to include, the particular language to use, etc. Concision in writing is also really not one of my strengths (oops), so my Methods often turned out too wordy. With Methods actually being a part of the research paper in Mod 2, I'm going to have to pay particularly close attention to how I approach that section. In the context of an actual full-length research paper, I think it would definitely be helpful to write the Methods section immediately before the Results section, since that provides a somewhat parallel structure that could help make sure I'm not forgetting anything in the Results section that I did in the Methods.

I also found the Introduction/Background section to be difficult to approach, just because there's so much flexibility with how and what you decide to present there. Going off of that, I think that the single hardest thing about scientific writing from the context of the M1 Data Summary was deciding what story to tell. This dictated virtually all of the Introduction/Background and a large portion of the Discussion/Implications, and I think not having a defined story you want to tell before proceeding with the paper makes everything a lot harder. That is definitely something I will be keeping in mind going through Mod 2, and all the practice we did with scientific writing for the M1 Data Summary has genuinely been a huge help in becoming familiar with writing in that genre and in taking ownership of the work we've done.

A few particular things we learned that I found really helpful:

• How to write titles and captions! The whole idea of making titles of figures and of section headings a complete thought was new to me
• What to include vs. not include in Methods writing 
• How to make figures/schematics
• Organization of scientific writing in general
• All of the Communication workshop lessons were useful and I learned something new from each one of them