One of my favorite things to do here at work is to write. Lumped in with that task is to edit or peer review my coworkers documents. This is one role that I have maintained on my previous "not so great" project for a few of my coworkers. I know the goals of the projects, I know the client, and maybe more importantly I know and understand the chemistry and physics. For this reason I seem to have become their "one stop shopping" for editing needs and peer reviewing requirements. There is a big meeting in the radiation detection community coming up at the end of this week. So it is no surprise that my mailbox was flooded with peer review requests and editing requests Friday late afternoon. Along with these requests, also came a charge code for my week... yay!
Ok, I will admit it... this feeds my ego. I like that I am the first person that this group of people comes to with regards to technical writing and presentations. For me it reaffirms my legitimacy on this project for the first 2.5 years of my career here. I learned something, I still know it and I am not the idiot that I think the project manager tried to make me into. Of course I don't peer review *his* documents... but so what. It isn't his opinion that matters anymore.
I view this task as very important. Some people take it less seriously, but I take great pride in returning a document that is well formatted, spelling has been checked (thank you spell checker and why do some people ignore this feature?), has decent punctuation (my weak point), and most of all makes sense. The hardest part for me is balance. How do I balance changes that aren't vital to the paper or presentation's effectiveness with whatever creative licensure the first author should have.
Example, one of the documents that appeared in my mailbox Friday was a poster. For those of you not in the scientific community, a poster is not part an art contest. Well, not really. It is intended to convey research in one large 3'x4' (usually) document. You then stand by your poster while people walk around mingling, most often with an alcoholic beverage in hand. If you loathe the research, than you go walk around and mingle too, avoiding your own poster, and with alcoholic beverages in your hands. (Been there.) Or if you are eager to share your research and network, you stand by your poster and jump on anyone who pauses in front. (Been there too.)
Despite this not being an art contest, there is art to laying out the poster. (I started out college as an art and biology major... I know art. I don't know a damn thing about biology, however.) If you are a poor graduate student you might print out 8.5" x 11" pieces of paper on your groups printer, buy some poster board, sneak into the office to cut your poster board to 9" x 11.5" and then use glue sticks to attach your paper to the poster board. If you are a "professional" then you use PowerPoint to lay out your entire poster and then have it printed up on a big plotter. In both cases, the use of color and font size is extremely important. You want someone standing 8' away who fears personal interactions (90% of your audience) to be able to read your poster, but you also want to attempt to lure in those people as well.
The poster I received Friday was a journal article. Seriously. He took his journal article, cut it up into sections and pasted each section (in full) on the PowerPoint poster. He did increase the font from 10 point to 14 point though. Oy vey.
Artistic licensure. It is HIS poster, it is what he wanted. It isn't like this guy fears having to talk with people... no way, J is a magnet and with his expressive personality will keep people standing around him as long as possible explaining the minute details. Why then, does he persist in creating posters like this?
I e-mailed him... "before I review the content, are you happy with the layout and format of your poster"? Yeah, he replies, I have spent a lot of hours on it. Ok... artistic licensure... I reviewed the content, I made a few formatting changes, loads of wording changes, some changes for clarity and nudged things around a little, including the font up to 18 point where possible. Then this morning I sent it back to him and ticked off my box saying that the poster was "peer-reviewed" and can appropriately represent the lab in the outside world. I read this as content... the content has passed all measures. I am not a graphic designer, and I am not being paid as a graphic designer, I am paid to assess technical content.
A few other posters to peer review (none will be in the state of the previous one). Then onto the next subject... a journal article. "Please edit, add in new content in attached document, and put in the proper journal submission format" were the instructions. With this task and charge code also comes the noteriety of having my name in position one. The coveted first author. The negotiated trade off for assembling the data (some taken by me a year and a half ago, much recently taken by others) and writing the paper. Truth be told, I finished the paper last fall, but we put off submission knowing that this new data was on the way. Not nearly as exciting and flashy as a poster, but far more important to me in the larger scheme of things.
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