I Heart You

[thagirion]

Just got back from going to the state fair. Was a lot of fun. Chris and I celebrated both Valentine's Day and our anniversary today. We looked at all the cool displays and he bought me a huge sun catching crystal that was round. This is the best rainbow maker I have. The amazing thing is it was only $8 when they usually go for like $40. I had

Comments

[cheezey]

Wow, is she defensive much or what? I didn't see any kind of attack in your words, either.

And I'm curious as to what scientific branch of the industry that she works in, because I spent several years contributing to pharmaceutical research study reports, and they're repetitive as heck and full of jargon. I often had to ask my boss and other PhDs who would write stuff to clarify and explain what they meant with certain phrasing and terms because they'd forget that not everyone reading the thing is a statistician or an expert in the niches they'd been researching/studying for years. Plus while redundancy is discouraged in the same section of the report, things are repeated in different sections ad nauseum. I should know, I used the copy/paste quite liberally in putting those together! Sometimes I would have to take several sentences verbatim from the statistics reports appended to the report and put them in the results sections of the main body of the report.

And yes, you're absolutely right that the higher up you are, the less you do as far as the grunt work of report writing goes. Speaking from my own experience in the field, I (someone with the educational background of a BS) used to draft the bulk of a given report using the raw data and supplementary pieces, and the veterinarians and PhDs who designed and oversaw the study pretty much read what I initially put together and wrote the conclusions of what the data meant, and revised/added the text where they considered it necessary.

[thagirion]

I know. I wrote my share of reports and hate them as much as English essays. It's nice one you're higher up the chain to have others do the dirty work for you. Who wouldn't want that? Like I said the little "paper" she showed me was on paragraph not at all journal format. That's exactly what I mean. Many of the sections are nothing but rehashing the same thing. In fact when I was in college one of my professors said if you're looking for a reference just read the Abstracts as that's a short version of everything else. I used to go to the library and found the archive of old paleontological journals and would pretty much just do that since no matter how much I loved paleo some of those papers were more potent than a sleeping potion.

What's just totally mind blowing about this is that I was agreeing with her. She then changed her tune to the opposite which tells me right there she's contradicting herself and really doesn't know where she stands.
BTw, I always enjoy your little insights in to these things because you see things from another point of view that is also right.