First draft

The last few weeks have seen me writing the first draft of a paper my supervisor and I are going to submit on the work we have been considering.

The experience has been a difficult one, trying to temper my writing style to the necessarily formal style required of a paper whilst remaining succinct and mildly understandable. Anyone that has read this diary for a reasonable period of time will realise that brevity is not one of my strong points; indeed, I could hardly defend myself against a charge of verbosity. To that, Your Honour, I must plead guilty. (Though I've tried. Goodness knows, I've tried.)

Writing the paper also requires filling in many of the small gaps that often appear whilst going through work for the first time — the "I'll sort that sum out later on" syndrome. It is easy enough to explain: if you are working through a problem and there is a small detail getting in the way, it is easier to pursue the bigger picture instead of getting bogged down in the minute details (a 1/2 here, a k! there etc.). Consequently, you find yourself with plenty to write about but with examples that need some work to get into presentable form.

In particular, that has comprised the largest amount of time the last couple of weeks: sorting out the examples. First you have to find some (which isn't so easy), then work through the details and then not show your workings. It is one of the small ironies of my mathematical "career": in courseworks, exams and general work since high school, teachers/lecturers always stress that students "show their workings", and here I am, having traversed more workings than I ever have before, and I don't get to show them! Someone, somewhere is having a laugh.

Bringing together the various aspects of the work (for which you can read: trying to figure out what the heck most of the seemingly random pieces of paper on my desk have scrawled on them) is a pleasing exercise, one of the few that you can see being useful training for life outside of academia. Obviously, having decided to leave my PhD in the summer, I am conscious of the skills I have picked up or am developing which may be of use in the future, and this period of writing the paper has certainly seemed useful. I have always found writing reports interesting/satisfying, since I enjoy collating all of the relevant information and making it into one (hopefully) cohesive whole, and I guess that is the sort of thing people to in the Real World.

Once the draft is finished, I'll pass it on to my supervisor who will rightly have plenty of suggestions to make concerning how to make it better.