Hello blogosphere and beyond…

It happened. I have written and posted my first typing on my blog. The idea to start a blog has been in my head for some time and only now I have decided to start it. Why now?

The reason for me to blog is that I am one of those post-docs that is mostly interested in doing experiments and not in writing it up. And since I do not write-up my experiments, I fail to train myself to be a better writer. I tend to write slowly and not so clearly. That makes that I often need to restructure my texts before I send it to a journal for review. And even then I get it back with comments from the reviewers such as:

” The introduction lacks focus”

That was a comment on my last paper after the first round of revisions. Luckily that paper is now finished and will be published in the next weeks in Plos ONE. The story is now much more focussed and detailed compared to the first draft I submitted to Plos ONE. That was an embarrassment when I got the comments back.

Now I have started this blog to try to polish my writing skills, and to get into a writing routine to help me with my publications. As most scientists know, it is either publish or perish. But even if I leave science, I will still meet jobs where writing is a large fraction of the work, so I better train myself.

I will use this blog to write about my experiences as a microbiologist dealing with high-throughput data and the bioinformatics needed for that. Additional topics could include my ideas on science in general, and I will post reviews on interesting publications that I find in the literature.

So here we say….

Too boldly go…

Yes, I am a bit of a Treky….
Thomas