Writing That Journal Article

I have to do it. It’s time.

I need to publish something science-y.

That’s what motivated me to write my post on Monday. But honestly, that post was mostly procrastination. And so is this.

I hate technical writing. I enjoy writing fiction. I enjoy blogging. I like writing what I’m writing right now.

I also enjoy telling people about my research, and doing the research and making discoveries. Heck, the lab is full of students right now working on projects related to my research and I can’t wait to see the results!

But, as the old saying goes, in science it’s ‘publish or perish.’ If you don’t publish your research, it didn’t happen. You didn’t do it.

So I have to do it. I have to write this stuff up.

I’m working on the technical version of the study I describe here, about giant rodents. Notice that I wrote that over a year ago. I had the conclusions then. I had all my data. All my interpretations. Why isn’t it written yet?

Technical writing gives me all sorts of anxiety. Maybe from all the horrid red marks on papers over the years. Maybe it’s my OCD demanding that everything be ‘perfect’ (which of course, is completely unobtainable).

But I still haven’t written the darn thing.

But I’m gonna, in the next week and a half.

I’m applying the ideas on how to write a journal article in 7 days, along with modifying the ‘pomodoro method‘ to force myself to write. I’ll force myself to write in 25 minute spurts, one per hour whenever I can, a few times a day. I did one such spurt yesterday and whipped out nearly my entire introduction. (Whoa.) I have to hammer out the results and discussion section(s) now, and then turn the conclusions from a bulleted list to prose. Then, it’s editing and polishing, and typing up my references cited.

It should go pretty easily. The research is done. I have all my references and data. I just have to write it.

And, by golly, I will.

(I hope.)