How it feels to write journal papers
I am writing a journal paper this week..mostly "editing" to be precise, and as always, I am overwhelmed in writing task, the frequently required task not only in academia, but in any jobs.
Writing a journal paper is certainly different from ranting my words on email, IM, or on blog exactly like I am doing right now. It has to be peer-reviewed, and certainly requires good organizations and grammar. A friend of mine in the lab who got PhD and graduated earlier this year used tell me that one could write like the way one talks. He is a good writer without a doubt, and he published many papers before writing the dissertation (and he is a native English speaker while I am not.) But, the spell of "good organizations and grammar" always freaks me out, and it freezes my brain.
It seems that I have no problem writing Japanglish emails or blogs in any length. But I always have problems in writing technical descriptions, where I have to be careful what to write first, and what to write next without having a redundancy. I also I have to be careful in expressions; my professor tells me that my writing style is a bit casual for a scientific journal. There is also another fundamental difference in writing a technical description; 90% of what I write is not opinions or thoughts, but it is the observations of facts that literally have to be transmitted to third-person readers.
They say that good writings are good in the same way, and bad writings are bad in their own ways. As a software engineer, what I first think with this saying is software programming. Software programming is exactly like that when you see those by skilled programmers and unskilled programmers. I know one can acquire the skills of programming in a systematized lessons. Then, why not in writing formal papers? I hope, one day, my writing task will be more systematized, and I will know better what I am doing.