So many words

After writing 5000 words for the research article, I'm going to follow Noreen's advice and keep it concise. The biggest thing I learned while writing this paper was that you need to know what you want to conclude from the data before you start writing. This was hard for me because I like to do things from start to finish. I guess it's time to adapt because that doesn't work for research papers. Results and discussion are the most important parts of the paper because, as it turns out, data analysis is the hardest part. It's relatively straightforward to detail methods and write about background, but pulling meaning out of data and sorting out the facts takes patience, time, and lots of help from everyone in 20.109. It was stressful and definitely overhwelming at times, but this assignment ultimately has given me confidence that when I set out to write my first real research paper it will be successful because of all of the guidance I received with this assignment. I guess that's why we have to take CI-Ms! I think we can all agree that the key-word from that acronym is INTENSIVE.....