Tuesday, October 03, 2006

She's Firin' on all Cylinders, Cap'n!

It was suggested to me that I create a new blog through which to unleash my creative outlets upon the poor, unsuspecting, sitting-duck that is the world. (Since my old blog had a silly name, silly content, was rarely updated and had a readership consisting solely of me).
So, er, here I am and ready to ramble at to you. Sadly, it's now nearly midnight and I'm not feeling very witty. What I am feeling is tired.
Anyone, something quick to talk about. Scientific papers. My tutor gave me a few to peruse today (first day of term, by the way) and they seem to be written witht he express intention of not being understood by anyone. Least of all me! So, (yeah, yeah, bad style to start a sentence like that, but it's a presposition you should never end a sentence with.) So, I decided to go through the paper phrase-by-phrase and put it in language that the common man (i.e. me) can understand. It took me twenty minutes to go through the first four lines of the abstract - what I wrote out was two thirds of a page long, still not particularly easy to understand and not really a translation of very much. I then came up against a sentence that I couldn't get my head around and simultaneously ground to a halt & realised the flaw in my plan - I can't write it out in my own words to help me understand it if I don't understand it in the first place. Frankly, being outsmarted by a piece of paper is quite hard to stomach.

I shall now retire.

1 comment:

Cath said...

'Peruse', I like that word :) Nice blog, very int-er-esting indeed. I shall continue to read your updates as they come. Bye for now, C x