Day 324: Rewriting

Today is a bunch of meetings and a bunch of editing. As I mentioned (or at least think I mentioned here), I had to meet with the senior author for the paper I’m working on and I got a lot of feedback, some of it was good, most of it meant more work for me. That’s the process though, write, rewrite, re-re-re-re…rewrite.

First drafts are as a rule, aweful. Take my blog posts for example, they are first drafts, not great, but they get the point across… mostly. In technical writing though, we need to get the point across all the time, 100% of the time. We can’t waste the readers time with superfluous information, exaggerations, etc. Clearly, this is not my normal style of writing (waves vaguely in the direction of my blog).

So first draft turns into fifth draft, which then turns into twentieth draft, it’s all very long and drawn out. I’m close though, I know I am because it was finally reviewed by the senior author, the professor who sort of kicked off the project. The fact that it was good enough for her to read meant that we were getting close to submitting it for review.

Like I mentioned, I got a lot of positive feedback, which was nice. I really want to make a good impression on her because I want her on my PhD committee and I feel like it would help her be more interested in the work I’m doing, which is tangent to the work she does, if she knew that I wasn’t going to waste her time.

This week has been slammed for me. I’ve had barely any time to relax and I’ve been in meeting after meeting and it won’t stop until this weekend, so edits are going to have to wait until then at the earliest because I’ve just got so much on my plate at the moment. I’m anxious to get stuff done, but it doesn’t seem like there is an end for a lot of the work I’m doing. A good example of this is the other set of experiments I’m working on, that is just getting dragged on and on by needing more data, COVID-19, etc. So by at least getting this paper out, I can focus on some of the other tasks.

Basically I’ve got a lot of work to do. Since I don’t want to do the work, the question is what’s a good way to still feel like you’re being productive? Oh that’s right, blogging! Maybe I should get back to work now.