Tag: technical writing

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The Light Bulb Moments

This is what science is made of: Long stretches of I-have-no-clue-what-this-means, but as you go along with it, you might find a light bulb or two (or more like, a couple burning candles)*.

Sometimes, you will go through literature and concepts which make no sense to you. You will go over them again and again without absorbing anything (like when you have to go over a sentence twice just to confirm that it is (indeed) written in English). Did you perhaps miss a lecture in your classes? Missed a lesson life might have been trying to teach you at some point in the past? Or are you just missing the point here? Were you just not made for this? Did that escalate really quickly**?.

You will feel hopeless and a failure and start debating every life decision you have made leading you to this particular research article. But, in time, you will find this is not entirely true. You will realize (at some point) that all that reading and going through concepts, again and again, was actually going through to your brain in some way. And that you are definitely not as dumb as you had started to think you were (not too many self-esteem points, though – you are still capable of dumbness, just not as much as you had begun to believe).

Somewhere along, you see that it has started to make some sense. That definitely this line that you are reading right now, this would have been complete nonsense a couple journal articles ago.

It doesn’t happen all of a sudden, not (at all) like someone has switched on a light bulb. But the vision slowly clears and you can see a little more. It’s like each new paper you go through, you start to understand everything just a bit better than before (in some kind of a cumulative effect). 

That all that wandering wasn’t getting you lost. That there’s still hope for you (probably).

 

*This definition may differ from scientist to scientist.

**The answer is yes.

 

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Problem: Solutions

Lately in science, I have been trying to dissolve a  couple of salts in some “solvent” – I have now tried some options, but nothing has really worked so far.

So today, after around 3 weeks of trying to dissolve that salt, I sat down to compile the results of all my mixtures of salts-and-solvents – they could definitely not be called “solutions”.

And that was exactly what was wrong with these, not only scientifically and technically, but also on a literary level: What do I call them when I am writing my report to send to my supervisor?

We, scientists, are supposed to be very specific in terms of technical terms. So I could call them “solutions”, because I was ultimately aiming to make a solution but just was not getting there. But then, they weren’t really solutions, so how could I call them that? If I did, what kind of a scientist would that make me? Would I even be able to sleep at night?

It was a relief I could use the word “suspension” appropriately enough for some of them. That was really so considerate of that particular salt-solvent combination to give me the freedom to use another word.

For all other… Mixtures? Salt-solvent systems?… What do I call them? Or do I just craftily go on writing about them, carefully avoiding sentence structures where I would need to use the you-know-what word?

It’s crazy what people expect of a PhD student: they have to be a scientist in the lab, a writer when writing reports and papers and dissertations, and  an excellent communicator when they are supposed to present their work (and the best sales person if they choose to go into entrepreneurship).

And being a writer at that particular moment of time, how many times could I allow myself to use the word “mixture” over and over again? Or using the same sentence structure for every next line?

I do not know how I managed all that today. I just hope I can sleep at night.