The Struggles and Achievements of Article Writing

Just finished writing the research article for module two! But I wasn't too sure what to think about it. The entire document ended up as a 3,400 word, 20 page beast that took me hours upon hours to complete. For many people, this assignment would seem to be easier, especially after Module 1. However, I found this article to be just as difficult as the last one. There is this sort of scientific language that many other papers use, but I still have yet to pick up on it. Even after reading other articles, I still find it difficult to incorporate that type of language into my writing. The concise and definite method of writing conflicts with my education as a writer in the past, which has been overwhelmingly based on humanities. I know that science and liberal arts can absolutely live together, but adapting my writing style from one subject to another has just been hard for me.

Another issue has been the type of research completed in Module 2. Near the end of the research effort, things didn't go exactly as planned and our results were less than ideal. In the real world, this would simply necessitate a re-trial of our protocol, taking extra care not to mess up this time. But in the strict time span of the Module, we had to carry forward and complete the experiment with reagents from other sources. Natalie suggested that we frame the first part of the experiment as a "pilot study" for the rest. I wasn't too sure how to accomplish that, but I looked at the mutants we generated and the amino acid mutations were identical to two strains that the teaching faculty provided! It turns out that the T541Y and T541L that we created were also represented as NB487 and NB491! So being able to smoothly incorporate our mutant strains in the article was especially rewarding. The mutants we created were kind of a happy accident, but I'm completely okay with taking advantage of the situation. For now, I don't really have a clever photo to finish up my blog post. So here's a gif of a hamster eating a burrito.