Why is starting the hardest part?

The hardest part of any writing assignment for me is just knowing where to start. You have to commit to a main point and trust that you will be able to follow through with it. For me, writing the abstract was a painful process because I had to organize all of my ideas and decide how I wanted the data summary to flow and progress through the work we did in module 1. Throughout module 1, however, I have become more comfortable with just writing something down and then learning to evaluate it. Once there are ideas on a page, it is significantly easier to revise them to sound the way you intend. I think one of the key factors for me learning to pick out what is right and wrong in different parts of scientific writing has been the communication workshops with Diana. I really enjoyed the interactive nature of these workshops. In particular, working with my lab partner to evaluate an abstract or figure from a published paper taught me many important things. First, it was great to get experience working together as we learned proper writing and presentation techniques because then we started our work on the data summary on the same page. Additionally, comparing how each group decided to revise the given writing sample showed me how many different ways you can approach a problem in scientific writing and still end up with a good result. Finally, it was helpful to see common mistakes that are made in papers to know what to avoid in our data summary. 

Once the abstract was written, I found that the rest of the data summary was fairly straightforward until implications and future work. For the most part, in class and through homework assignments we had already worked with our data to make figures and evaluated our results. It was then easier to write out these thoughts clearly because we had already received feedback on many of them. Implications and future work  was difficult because we had to be careful not to go too big with our future work section. Realistically, we can not jump from doing a single SMM screen to curing Alzheimers but it is nevertheless tempting to say something along those lines in future work. This was one of the biggest conceptual things my partner and I had to fix in our data summary revisions. Ultimately, the data summary really helped me understand some of the key objectives and qualities of good scientific writing. I look forward to using this as we move through module 2 and will hopefully struggle less with our next big assignment!