Introduction

As scientists, we typically write our scientific papers in English for global accessibility. That got me thinking, why not write my blog in English as well? Today, I am posting my first English blog.

   This new challenge has two objectives. First, to improve my English writing skill. Writing is the skill I feel I am lacking the most compared to other communication skills: speaking, reading, and listening. However, besides speaking, I believe writing is the most difficult skill to develop alone. Therefore, my initial drafts of blog posts will be reviewed by a native speaker and I hope to improve my writing skill through this process.

   Second, I am interested in how many readers I can get if I write in English rather than in Japanese. English articles should have more global exposure, however, there will be increased competition from other bloggers, too. My initial hypothesis is that my English posts will have fewer readers than my Japanese posts. However, if I choose the topic carefully, my English posts may become more relevant to specific groups of people and boost my read count.

   A principal aim of my blog is to fill gaps in knowledge. Recently, I have been trying to choose topics (for my Japanese blog) that have never been discussed before and thus are in a greater demand. As a result, some of my recent posts succeeded in getting a greater number of views. This came to make me realize the similarities between writing a blog and a scientific paper: both require “novelty” and “significance”. Therefore, I regard writing this blog as further scientific training.

   As we do in scientific papers, I will write this English blog series formally and professionally. Furthermore, I will endeavor to keep articles simple and short, hopefully ~300 words (approximately equal to that of the abstract of a scientific paper). I do realize that the influence of my blog posts on the world is tiny, but I would like to know exactly how tiny it is.