Friday, April 13, 2012

Manuscript: Exists!

I am feeling rather tired, but pretty good, for I have reached my goal for this week. I now have a manuscript, a proto-scientific-paper. It's still a long way from submission to the journal, it lacks references, acknowledgements, some formatting clean-up, the attention and approval of my co-authors, and other things – heck, it doesn't yet have a proper title! But it does have an Introduction, Methods & Materials, Results, and Discussion, in proper English sentences and paragraphs. The vast majority of the words are in the places they're going to end up in the finished product, and anyways the core ideas and story are certainly in place. There are also four figures with complete figure captions, and a pile of statistical tests buried under cryptic mentions of p-values and such.

Considering this was little more than a pile of data scraped into a single Excel file on Tuesday afternoon, and less than that a week ago, I'm feeling pretty good about this. Beyond the utility of getting something DONE, the more short-term accomplishment of giving me something to talk about in Montreal in two weeks has also been achieved. My talk at that conference (Thursday, April 26, in the afternoon) doesn't yet exist at all, but I now have a pretty good idea of what the main figures are going to look like and what I'm going to be saying.

1 comment:

Kitty Hannah said...

Oh, serendipitous timing! Today is Apr 26. Good luck with the Montreal talk and/or hope it went well. Also, well done on the paper! Writing papers (or in my case features, extended op-eds and the like) is always an endeavor of sorts, as is fact checking and making sure that spelling and syntax are shipshape. Did I just use the word "shipshape"? Man, reading BrummellBlog does weird things to my vocab... ;-)