I used to be a writer. I would write poems, essays, stories. Anticipating a career in journalism, I would dream in front-page style prose, narrating my days as a reporter, thinking of headlines and hooks to describe my days.
And then medical school happened. As mentors and preceptors and senior residents laughed at my expansive H&Ps, they successfully condensed to concise, to-the-point, fragments of vital information. The lazy whimsical sentences I loved and lyrical sentence structure were replaced with abbreviations and staccato paced paragraphs. I chose to pursue a career in Emergency Medicine, a specialty whose abbreviated notes are bested by surgeons only.
In order to graduate, I need to complete my final research project. An interesting study, one that appeals to my sense of patient autonomy, physician personhood, and good medicine. Draft 1 is done. But I can't seem to get myself to do the hard edit, the dissection, the real shaking out and rewriting the paper needs to be publishable.
As I mindlessly consumed blog posts last night from around the small corner of the internet that interests me, one comment a fellow doc-mom noted struck a chord. She mentioned that she was a PhD student who started blogging to sharpen her writing skills before starting her thesis manuscript. Maybe blogging- a 30 day challenge- will help me do the same?
