Zeroing in on why scientific writing can be downright excruciating.
I like writing, as I often have to remind myself while seething with frustration over a 20.109 report. And I like science, too. I promise I do. So why do I push all of my 20.109 assignments to the bottom of my mental to-do list and take literal hours to type two mediocre-at-best pages and end up with a backlog of late assignments? Why is scientific writing so painful?
Last summer, I wrote a methods paper for my PI. When I turned the first draft of my introduction into him for review, I honestly expected praise. I had had fun writing it, and the way I chose to describe complex biological machinery felt fresh and easy to understand, aided by cute metaphors and spunky prose. Instead, I was told the entire thing needed a rewrite. Every sentence, my PI told me, needed the backing of a citation, and no one had yet published a paper to support "The bolstered immune team targets and attacks the tumor in its infancy." Instead of constructing, long flowery sentences full of personifications and impactful verbs, I had to describe a set of facts in the most expedient and strictly accurate manner possible. Which is so, so much harder.
With the scientific writing process, I meet mental resistance almost immediately. I get in my own head and tell myself that this sentence, whatever it is, has one correct way to be written. There is one right way to express the amount of reagent that must be transferred to the sample, one right word that will capture the essence of the message I'm trying to convey most concisely, one correct sentence structure that will maximize clarity and expediency. All other options are varying degrees of wrong. And so, as a chronic and severe overthinker, the "paralysis by analysis" starts to set in. I write the sentence the way my gut tells me. Then I read it again and imagine I'm Noreen, reading my methods section, and I'm sure there's something wrong with it. No way it's the right sentence. I come up with criticisms for the way I've written it, unsure if they're grounded in fact, but sure that something's wrong, and maybe it's this? So I change something, but wait, I wrote something the other way two paragraphs ago, does that need to be changed too? Is it wrong? I figured it was, but maybe it's not, maybe this new way is wrong? And there's so much guessing right from wrong that as I write that I feel like I'm throwing darts in a dark room and I have to determine whether or not I've hit the bullseye by the way the air feels. See, was that metaphor about the darts the most expedient way to convey myself? Probably not, but since this is creative writing, there's a thousand right ways to say something, and I can leave that sentence where it lies without having to obsess over the wording or worry about it three paragraphs from now.
And so I normally just give up on being right and tell myself it's going to be bad and that getting some wrong words on the page is better than getting nothing on the page.
There's nothing fun or rewarding about it for me. There's none of the self-expression and none of the thrill of new ideas that comes with creative writing. I feel like someone gave me an arbitrary set of rules that I now have to follow to a T or my work will be "bad." And this really sucks, because at this point in my academic career, all I ever do is science writing, and I can feel it seeping into my formerly creative style. When I try to write stories, my brain feels permanently switched into precision mode, and all my sentences strive to be the most straightforward they can be. Which is boring to read and takes the artistry out of the art. Once a creative endeavor, writing, for me, has become a multiple choice problem with a billion options and one right answer.
I want to make clear that my distaste for the process is entirely unrelated to the way 20.109 is structured and run. The teaching staff does an excellent job. The frequent feedback and practice is helping me in the long-run and I can feel some of the guesswork being taken out of the process as I improve. But it's a slow process and it's still some of my least favorite classwork to struggle through, despite all the help and support.
Last summer, I wrote a methods paper for my PI. When I turned the first draft of my introduction into him for review, I honestly expected praise. I had had fun writing it, and the way I chose to describe complex biological machinery felt fresh and easy to understand, aided by cute metaphors and spunky prose. Instead, I was told the entire thing needed a rewrite. Every sentence, my PI told me, needed the backing of a citation, and no one had yet published a paper to support "The bolstered immune team targets and attacks the tumor in its infancy." Instead of constructing, long flowery sentences full of personifications and impactful verbs, I had to describe a set of facts in the most expedient and strictly accurate manner possible. Which is so, so much harder.
With the scientific writing process, I meet mental resistance almost immediately. I get in my own head and tell myself that this sentence, whatever it is, has one correct way to be written. There is one right way to express the amount of reagent that must be transferred to the sample, one right word that will capture the essence of the message I'm trying to convey most concisely, one correct sentence structure that will maximize clarity and expediency. All other options are varying degrees of wrong. And so, as a chronic and severe overthinker, the "paralysis by analysis" starts to set in. I write the sentence the way my gut tells me. Then I read it again and imagine I'm Noreen, reading my methods section, and I'm sure there's something wrong with it. No way it's the right sentence. I come up with criticisms for the way I've written it, unsure if they're grounded in fact, but sure that something's wrong, and maybe it's this? So I change something, but wait, I wrote something the other way two paragraphs ago, does that need to be changed too? Is it wrong? I figured it was, but maybe it's not, maybe this new way is wrong? And there's so much guessing right from wrong that as I write that I feel like I'm throwing darts in a dark room and I have to determine whether or not I've hit the bullseye by the way the air feels. See, was that metaphor about the darts the most expedient way to convey myself? Probably not, but since this is creative writing, there's a thousand right ways to say something, and I can leave that sentence where it lies without having to obsess over the wording or worry about it three paragraphs from now.
And so I normally just give up on being right and tell myself it's going to be bad and that getting some wrong words on the page is better than getting nothing on the page.
There's nothing fun or rewarding about it for me. There's none of the self-expression and none of the thrill of new ideas that comes with creative writing. I feel like someone gave me an arbitrary set of rules that I now have to follow to a T or my work will be "bad." And this really sucks, because at this point in my academic career, all I ever do is science writing, and I can feel it seeping into my formerly creative style. When I try to write stories, my brain feels permanently switched into precision mode, and all my sentences strive to be the most straightforward they can be. Which is boring to read and takes the artistry out of the art. Once a creative endeavor, writing, for me, has become a multiple choice problem with a billion options and one right answer.
I want to make clear that my distaste for the process is entirely unrelated to the way 20.109 is structured and run. The teaching staff does an excellent job. The frequent feedback and practice is helping me in the long-run and I can feel some of the guesswork being taken out of the process as I improve. But it's a slow process and it's still some of my least favorite classwork to struggle through, despite all the help and support.
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