Blogversary reflections

A quick post…on blogging and PhD

Today marks five years since I launched the first post of this blog. There are very few activities I’ve kept doing in my life for this long, so I’m honestly surprised that I haven’t abandoned blogging yet. Moreover, despite what my blogging frequency might suggest, I don’t have any plans to do so!

Of course, I look back at my old posts -most of which are not public anymore- and I cannot avoid the embarrassment. However, I have accepted it as necessary, or else I would never publish a post. And perhaps the embarrassment is a good sign, as Alain de Botton said: “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough”.

The nearing one-year mark through my PhD is a good opportunity to reflect on what to expect from my blogging for the rest of my PhD. Admittedly, I haven’t blogged as much as I’d have liked to. I always struggled to decide whom I was writing for. This year, I have realised that it’s myself that I write for. Here’s why:

My “personal” blog is now only a section of my “academic” website. This means that the overall website is not optimised for directing attention to the blog. It also means that the people who stumble upon the blog will be miscellaneous researchers, who probably (and hopefully) have no interest in what I write here.

(As an aside, I am pretty happy to have been able to “recycle” the blog structure into the website that it is now. Going from scratch would have required a lot of effort and time: I probably would have passed having a website).

Although I know why I started the blog, I cannot remember what I envisioned for the blog when I started it. After some months of blogging, I cared about “growing” the “audience” of the blog. That’s what all the online advice on blogging says you should do. It was terrible advice for me. Not only did I fail remarkably (subject to some exceptions: I met two people who had come across my blog), but blogging also stopped being enjoyable.

Researchers (should) write a lot, which is good news because I like writing! However, writing well is tough (especially in a foreign language, as is my case with English) and not taught in a maths degree. Continuous practice is the best way to improve a skill; writing is no exception. Thus my current goal is to write every day. Sometimes for the blog, others for my research (which I will prioritize, but often there isn’t anything to write for my research). Scientific writing is different to blog-writing, but the skill for the latter should translate well to the former.

I don’t want my blog to be an extension of my (almost null) social media to earn me money. I want a public commitment to reflecting and writing about whatever is in my mind and occasionally distract me from the lows of academia. This is part of why I started blogging (the other reason being that it’s just very cool).

Overall, I expect better-written (GrammarlyPro-checked!) blogposts, of various lengths topics, and probably boring to read. Just like this one.