"It will take a long while to make it short"

Although this blog is informal, I think that choosing just part of my Mod 1 experience to write about in this post presents the same challenges that I felt in writing the abstract for our data summary. With so many pieces of my Mod1 story to tell right now, it’s difficult to pick what should be shared and what should not.

Although I have a tendency to procrastinate on long assignments, the data summary was actually not as terrible of an experience as I was expecting because having a partner holds me accountable for finishing my work on time. Damon and I started on it early, which was great because we were able to spread the work out over time more or less, so it didn’t end up being as much of a burden as I had anticipated.

For me, the results are the most straight-forward part of a paper because we have to write down the information about our data that we have already discussed. It did require a substantial amount of work to frame our results into a story, but I felt like I was able to write everything that I wanted to in order to convey the importance of each figure or statistic. 

In contrast, the abstract was a much more daunting task because we had just told a really long, important story through our introduction, results, and future work sections and we had to condense it into a short paragraph. Reading this short paragraph allows people to determine whether they think my research is worth reading further. When you spend so much time on writing the body sections of a paper, it is incredibly stressful to create a title and abstract that effectively convey the importance of your research.

When we first wrote our abstract, we tried to keep it short and to the point. We received feedback on it and then realized that by trying to only put the most important aspects of our project, we left out the interesting parts too, leaving it kind of vague and unmotivated.

With Diana’s helpful comments, we were able to add in details that helped convey that our project was important—fully defining a knowledge gap and then giving concrete evidence that we have solved a problem.

This experience has made me realize that it will be important to start early on my Mod 2 report, especially when I won’t have a lab partner to motivate me. I now know that I need to be more clear and give concrete examples in my abstract, and I definitely need to ask for help early!

cute puppy picture :)

P.S. The title is a reference to a Henry David Thoreau quote, "Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short."