Learning the hard way
I explored quite a number of tutorial, books and online material to grapple with one toughest question of life - How to put answers or thoughts in words ? Despite quite a lot of effort and a never ending feeling of insufficiency, I started writing my thoughts on paper. Is the writing grammatically correct ? I am writing to the standards where people will judge me based on Writing is all you go through. Are their spelling mistakes which are blatant to everyone’s eye. These questions lead me being a very self-critical about myself. These intriguing questions even lead me to Wittingstein theories[1] of words being symbolic representations of pictures in the mind. So, Can I imagine every concept in terms of pictures ? How do I visualise a math equation or a matrix representation in the visual form ? Too many questions to choke myself to the point where I failed to even begin jotting down.
Writing is process of traversing your network of thoughts in 1 dimensional order (except Tables and plots can be 2D :-)). The reader seeks to read the text in order to understand an academic experiment. Thereby understand the evaluation results achieved in a particular settings. First most, it is important for the writer to show the importance of the experiment in order to motivate the reader about the presented work and persuade him to actual understand the method being presented. The readers are usually lost with too much of new information presented in terms of figures and novel terms at the onset of the paper. The writer has a responsibility to present his work in lucid way by navigating the reader in his network of ideas without losing the sight of bird’s eye view of the map. The biggest hurdle of any scientific work is to go through existing literature which are written in different style and explain similar concepts in distinct way. The comprehension of various ideas and synthesis using common threads take enormous toll on the mental dashboard. The true value of any text is a function of reader prior knowledge and its relevance to reader community.
Does writing about topics which have no economic or scientific value is worth a read in today’s attention economy …
- Keyt, D. (1964). Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory of Language. The Philosophical Review, 73(4), 493–511., https://doi.org/10.2307/2183303