When do you stop rewriting?

The hardest part of scientific communication for me is figuring out exactly how I want to word things. For more structured outlines, I'm wholly dependent on outlines as scaffolds for my ideas. I always have ten thousand considerations racing in my mind, constantly ruminating on which phrases to include and what the perfect word for a concept is. It's less sentences and more fragments, which is amazing for outlines. I can build off of these blocks and find the right bit of logic to use in each place. But when I construct a sentence, when I polish that meaning, I find myself second-guessing each word and trying to make the structure more fluid. The tricky thing about scientific communication is that there's always a more concise, more purposeful way to elucidate your rationale. The data summary is about learning how to write in this way, but I don't know the jargon. I can reiterate the lectures and understand the purpose of our experiments, but when positioned as the author, I feel unequipped. What word describes the exact relationship between DNA damage and genomic instability? How do I describe the exact definition of DNA damage without plagarization? Somehow, it feels like all the ways to write a certain sentence have already been done. Or at least at the level I'm thinking in.

The homework, as much as I've struggled with it, has put my ideas into the earth and given me land in an endless ocean of ideas. It forces me to give the writing the time I know it deserves. Reflection, mediation of language are all nature to me. But forcing out the unrefined stream of consciousness? The activation energy is high and the output can be incomplete. I am better an editor than composer, because I am always unsatisfied with the way my words are. It's easy for me to be fixated on how to make one sentence work, than the make sure to review all the sentences for cohesiveness with the big picture. All my sentences are individual dots, which I ensure are full and perfectly circular, but they may not all be where they need to be, or are not well-connected to form the big picture. It is easy for me to lose focus, but I thank the instructors for providing guiding questions and constant feedback--those things anchor me and hew me to the outline. So often in writing the data summary I had confusion about what I should write and what is necessary to keep in mind. Now, I understand that personal experience is the only way to distill these concepts. 

In finding citations for the data summary, I found ways to state the concepts without feeling constantly unsubstantiated. The materials for the lecture felt overly general at times. I fretted deeply about making false claims, overreaching with the wrong descriptors, or oversimplifying a concept without using too many of another's well-chosen words. Finding papers to support what I already knew provided the vocabulary to communicate these ideas better. But I had only been able to utilize these papers fully after the lectures. While the lectures did not use the same level of technicality as many of these published works, they made these papers easily comprehensible. 

In writing the data summary, I've worked on finding a balance between writing what I need to write and elevating it to the appropriate level. I can't say if there's ever a limit to the amount of writing necessary, but I can say that scientific writing needs a process of outlining, substantiating, elongating, and editing at minimum. It takes a while, so I can really appreciate 20.109 starting these steps early! 

Linda Yu