Writing in Science, for Science, by Science: Takeaways

Whenever I think about an experiment or an idea in biology, my brain takes 15 different paths at the same time. It thinks about every aspect simultaneously, may it be the experimental procedure, possible caveats, hypothesis, alternative hypothesis, what I could gain if the experiment fails and if it succeeds, how might I modify the experiment to give me new directions in the future, what other experiments can be performed using this, some new fundamental principle in biology would I be able to discover or refute, which core biological entities are involved in the experiment and which ones can I not say for sure yet that they do affect my results, how can I extract the maximum information from whatever results I get, what are the maximum correlations I can make… After all these thoughts, two things that become readily apparent to me are that my mind will explode if I think more, and that this swirl of thoughts cannot be understood to anyone other than me. So my mind forgets all that it was thinking and instead starts stressing about the how any conclusions I get from the experiment would be absolutely useless if I cannot tell the world what I did, if I cannot talk to people in a coherent way, in which case they will walk away and never appreciate or even remember that such an experiment, such a result ever existed. Then I could say, “so what if people don’t learn to care about me, I am into science for my own sake not for pleasing someone else.” That’s true, but until your little work doesn’t become public, reproducible, and look like an essential step forward in science, nobody is going to benefit from you. You cannot make science progress if you limit your research to yourself, and then who knows what someone else can do with your idea, it may become a Nobel-winning cure to a pertinent world problem, and if not then it will at least someone else’s nerdy happiness on accomplishing a project that budded off yours, the same happiness that you once felt.


Okay so this establishes that communication in science is important, but it is undoubtedly difficult. What is especially difficult for me is to form a story out of my work, organize it in a way that the public is used to listening to and understanding, be concise, clear, declarative (and sometimes speculative) but not overestimate or boast. To support that (sarcastically), I am lazy and refrain from documenting my work whenever possible. All throughout my 9 months of UROP work in RNA structure probing, I let my laziness get the better of me, and hardly documented any technique or result. But 20.109 made me see that writing a lab notebook is not hard, it's a good habit that one must cultivate and maintain so you don’t miss important details of your project and know your entire workflow so your mind doesn’t have to time travel into the past a gazillion times to retrieve all what you did when you sit to write your project summary. And then it’s all digital now, so no excuses of misplacing notebooks or losing pages, it’s all there and always will be, unless you want to delete and make new memories. 20.109 helped me get into this essential routine and that too reinforced by grades, the best incentive one can get to get something done!


Now coming far from the days of learning to actually putting the work together for the data summary, I realised that I had most parts ready to be used in the final slides from all the (deadlines-heavy) homework that we had been doing. At that moment I learnt a very important lesson: work divided into isolated chunks and accomplished over time rather than powering through 3 days prior to deadlines drastically improves the quality of each chunk and reduces your mental stress. For the homework when I focused on just one small portion of the data summary, I could actually spend time thinking about that with a fresh mind. Additionally, I saw how important external feedback and collaboration are. Others see what you can’t see in your own work, and talking out your thoughts makes any writing easier because your mind automatically starts thinking about how best I could explain what I want to explain to the other person.


All in all, Module 1 was theoretically very enlightening, experimentally very rich and also extremely useful in teaching me important lessons and tricks of communication in science that I will hopefully carry forward with me. Thank you teaching team!


-Stuti Khandwala

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