This week the writing prompt is about how it feels to review and edit peoples papers, especially after learning about how peer review really works in the scientific community. Personally I really enjoy being able to read peoples writing and help them make it better. I have always enjoyed writing and editing, so while giving edit suggestions to other people for the mock proposals was very fun. Something that I learned is often having a pair of fresh eyes looking at your work can do wonders for your writing. A lot of the time when you are writing material you accidentally skip problems, and you miss these because as the writer you already have an idea of what the paper is supposed to look, feel and read like. Bringing someone else from the outside to look at your work, especially who does not know what your thought process was and is reading the writing for the first time is a amazing opportunity for the writer. They can help identify mistakes and sections of writing that don’t make any sense, but you may have missed yourself. This is why peer review is so crucial in the scientific community, and in this class. The whole purpose of this class is to help us learn the skills in the lab and the writing skills as a researcher to be able to write accurate and well constructed papers. Having peer review helps to expose flaws in writing or in the experiments themselves, and becomes a collaborative effort where the reviewers help to give advice to the researchers on what to change, improve and clarify. This is why peer review is required to publish in scientific journals, because this system of peer review helps insure that the research being published is both accurate and well spoken, to the point someone else could recreate their work if they wanted to replicate the results.
By learning these skills in this class, and giving each other edits and suggestions, it exposes us to looking at scientific drafts and seeing what common mistakes are. It is a very important skill that is applied to all research. For my own writing, I’ve realized that sometimes I try to cover too many ideas, and that I need to pinpoint what my goal is, because I tend to open up many similar avenues which becomes confusing. By focusing on one specific part of the topic of interest, I can make my experiment more specific and answer my question of interest much better.
