Out of words...

Time flies and my blog has been silent for almost a year. Several times I have been wanting to write a post, but nothing materialized. Lately, I realized that I am sometimes "out of words". Are you too?

When I applied for a position as a doctoral student at the Paul Scherrer Institute in 2008, I included at the bottom of my CV two awards for young writers that I got while I was at the university. I wrote short stories in my native language, French, and submitted them to writing competitions, because I always have liked to tell stories. These were work of fiction and a couple of times, I did get a prize. I remember that, towards the end of the interview, one of the interviewers made a comment about these awards and how it's nice to know that I am good at writing. At that time, I knew that I would have to write a thesis, but I had not realized the extent to which academia relies on people writing... almost all the time!

Word cloud generated by wordart.com using the text from this post.

Of course, scientists are doing experiments, making measurements, running models, and so on. An important part of the work is, however, the data analysis, which sometimes consists of... writing scripts! It is a different kind of writing, but still, you learn and language and write code to make the computers understand what you want them to do.

Then comes the writing of the results. It is usually in the form of a manuscript meant to be published in an international peer-reviewed journal. This is often a long and slow process that takes close to an infinite amount of iterations, editing constantly the text, taking in the input from co-authors, and so on. Even though it is a team effort and sometimes someone else is doing most of the writing, there are always your manuscripts that you are responsible for (e.g., first author, corresponding author).

On top of that, the year is sprinkled with many deadlines for grant applications. Here in Finland, September has many of them at the start of the academic year. Some of them are also in the spring. That can also mean a lot of writing. The pièce de résistance for each application is usually a research plan or research proposal that can be expected to be between a few pages up to almost twenty! The European Research Council wants you, for example, to prepare two distinct documents: a shorter one for the first phase and a longer one if you are selected for the second phase. If you're not getting into the second phase, though, it means that you spent time writing pages and pages that will never be read (except by the amazing people who provided you feedback and support during the process). Sometimes you also spend a lot of time on your research plan, only to realize during the online submission process that you need to come up with even more documents: cover letters, abstracts, public description of your project avoiding scientific jargon, justification for your budget, etc. Words, words, words!

On top of that come the daily myriad of e-mails, reports, abstracts for conferences, press releases, and various other documents that are part of the day-to-day activities of science. And also, for some of us... blog posts.

It is not uncommon that several months have passed between posts, but it's never been more than six months before on my blog. Looking back, I have to admit that the first half year of the Covid-19 pandemic was not easy, but still okay to handle for me personally. The months following my last post in November 2020 became way more challenging. A relative felt seriously ill, and I might have become speechless... at least for a while. This person is much better now, thankfully, but it is still a long way to a full recovery, it seems.

So that is maybe why, for a long time, I did not know what to say and what to write. I felt that we were in such an unbelievable and even absurd situation. I had the impression that taking the time to write here on my blog would be futile or senseless... However, now, during the busy writing time for proposals, I seem to have found some words again. Maybe bathing in all these words made some of them spill onto my blog for this post. 

I'll do my best to get back to a more regular schedule with interesting stories and views to share with you. In any case, thank you for reading this and do not hesitate to put your own words in the comments, if you feel that you want to share them with me and the world.

PS: I also recently worked on an English translation of one of the short stories that I wrote that got an award, thanks to my wonderful friends of the creative writing group from Soup Troupe. Maybe I'll share it somewhere some day ;-)