Writing this paper was really different from what I expected. Initially, I thought it was just going to be a really long paper and I was starting from square one. So when I first started I just opened a word document and started typing the introduction. I got about halfway through it before I realized we had basically already written half the paper and outlined the rest. So, I pulled all the homework assignments and outlines together and had 8 pages right off the bat. Great! This is going to go by so much faster than I thought. Boy was I wrong.
I ended up finishing the first draft pretty quickly, or at least faster than I thought. I believed I was on the home stretch then, I just have to go through and edit the paper and the figures and I’ll be done! So I started editing and it was bad.
So I just kept going. I red through the paper about 15 times and basically rewrote it each time. Each time the paper got better, but was liking it less and less. I think I got so familiar with the paper that the scientific language started to seem colloquial and informal. I’m so used to reading scientific papers and being very confused that reading through a paper and understanding it was unsettling. It made all the language seem simple and unnecessary. So I was really worried, but then I realized that maybe that's exactly how I should feel. The paper should ideally allow me to perfectly understand the material, and vis versa, writing a good paper pretty much requires good knowledge of the material. So maybe my paper was good! Probably not though…. I guess we’ll see.
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