Writing Hell

If it seems like I've been slacking off on the blog, it's true. I've been stuck in writing hell for the last week or so - so much so that I decided tomorrow I'm going to do menial lab chores to take a break. To give you an idea what excitement I've been enduring, here's a sample paragraph:

Using Fstat 2.9.3.2 (Goudet 2001), we characterized the variability within each locus by the number of alleles (A), the observed heterozygosity (Ho) and the expected heterozygosity (He). Additionally, we utilized Fstat to calculate FIS for each population, and overall f and θ following Weir & Cockerham (1984), and relatedness following Queller & Goodnight (1989). Fstat was also used to test for linkage disequilibrium, Beonferroin correcting for multiple comparisons (Rice 1989).

I dunno if that's English. Until yesterday, I was writing an in-house technical note that went like this -

We subsequently attempted extraction using a Qiagen® QIAmp DNA Mircro Kit (Valencia, CA). Contrary to our previous methods, which utilized a Guanidinium Thiocyanate (GuSCN) digestion, and a caustic digestion respectively, the Qiagen® QIAmp DNA Mircro Kit (Micro Kit) utilizes a GuSCN digestion in concert with Proteinase K and Dithiothreitol (DTT) digestion (QIAamp® DNA Micro Handbook, August 2003). We suspect that this allows the liberation of DNA product from protein, while causing minimal incidental damage to the DNA.

Just reading it makes my brain bleed. And this stuff follows me home at night.
Wildlife Biology - it's all glamorous and stuff.