Why I'm blogging

I'm a scientist, a dog-owner, an active godmother, a member of my local yiddish choir and erstwhile knitter. Why then, would I add to my to-do list (which is full of languishing projects from vacuuming to office clean-up to working out) yet another task?

Well, see, it's like this: a big part of my livelihood is writing. When you think of scientists (or any researcher, for that matter) you might not think of that verb, but writing is the heart of what we do. We write scholarly articles, lectures, grant proposals and literature reviews. When we're not writing our own stuff, we're reviewing someone else's. And this writing is often hard. We are charged with communicating complex, technical ideas as concisely as possible, always remembering to cite the right person, and to present these ideas in such a way as to never overstate our conclusions but still convince editors and reviewers that what we have to say is both novel and important. That's a lot of pressure.

I've come to notice that under all this pressure, writing has lost some of its joy for me. In the years preceding my science career, when I wrote newsletters, memos, progress reports and technical manuals, I had a lot of fun writing. Now, I approach my writing sessions with some dread and sense of impending failure. It seems inevitable that whatever I write won't be good enough for some reviewer. It can make a person feel a little less than eager to sit down in front of her manuscript and pound away at the keys.

This blog is my attempt to re-capture some of my enjoyment for the process of writing. It's a place to express my thoughts and ideas without the fearful pressures of peer-review, a place where I can use the first-person pronoun to my heart's delight and liberally embellish with adjectives. It would be an added to bonus to find that writing in this format loosens me up to work on more scholarly projects, and that the two forums feed each other.

Andiamo!