On not writing
Hey there, it’s been a while.
I’ve been having a problem. I’m sure it must be a common problem: when a study appears to be finished — the experiments are done, all the data are collected and analysed — I lose interest and I am ready to move on to the next shiny brand-new researchy thing.
Unfortunately, this is not quite the end of the study: it needs to be written up in proper scientific language and submitted to a scientific journal.
I don’t know if you can tell, but I am not a big fan of scientific journals and “the scientific language”. I find it quite boring*. The formula is always the same (Introduction — Methods — Results — Discussion) and not a joke in sight! I understand that it’s important to describe your methodology in enough detail for your study to be replicated, but these days, you could include a Jupyter notebook, or link to protocols.io. Am I right?! If you need some text to accompany the analysis and explain why you decided to do what you did, wouldn’t a blog post in your own personal style be more interesting?
I have a feeling that my university sees things a bit differently. So… scientific language it is. That means that every time I’ve sat down to write recently, I’ve had to do “scientific writing”, and it appears I have a limited amount of writing in me, because I haven’t managed to write blog posts as well.
But I’m back now, to finish what I started. Taking a page from any good American TV show, I’ve left you on a cliff hanger, and the new season is about to start. Get the popcorn ready.
*In the off-chance that any of the PhD students in my group are reading this, your papers are not boring, I am talking about everyone else’s papers obvs. Keep writing, you’re doing great :)
