You Gotta Have A Good Story

One of the hardest things I've had to deal with in this class is learning how to write scientifically, which is very much easier said than done.  It goes against every writing convention I've ever been taught, and yet it's so widely accepted to just always write passive sentences and simply run on and on about data.  Compiling the data itself wasn't particularly hard, it was putting everything together in a way that made sense, even if it didn't really make sense to me.  So, putting all that together into one paper, I'm sure we all had a rough time trying to make heads or tails of what does and doesn't need to be in our paper.

One of the most common things I heard while trying to write this was the fact that it needed to tell a story.  It wasn't enough to simply word vomit a bunch of numbers and figures onto a piece of paper and submit it as scientific research.  Keeping everything concise and direct while at the same time portraying a story of what exactly we did ultimately turned out to be the biggest struggle of this paper.  How were we supposed to keep everything bare-bones with little to know bias and still keep the literature interesting enough to actually be readable.

It's unfortunate that don't get to submit a draft before we get our final grade for this seeing as how I'm sure many of us made some fairly simple errors that we really couldn't have accounted for.  Unless someone has written as scientific journal article before, I doubt anyone would be able to get it right on their first try.  However, I did appreciate being able to talk to my peers and ask other people for advice on how I should go about writing any one particular detail (not too much advice of course, but you get the idea).  It will definitely be harder in the future when really I'm the only one who understands what I'm going to write about.  I won't be able to ask anyone for help since I alone did the research.  Then writing the article will be a huge job in itself that I won't be able to get very much help with.  At the very least, that's why there are editors to these journals and more people to read the paper, but even then it's still a very daunting idea.  I'm glad I was able to experience this now with multiple people to assist me as opposed to by myself in the middle of a grad level research project or something.  It was a great learning experience as far as time management and how to plan out writing a fairly large paper in a style that was completely foreign to most.