You call this summer?

I'm back from what was supposed to be a two-day vacation. Supposed to be, as in turned into a one-day scramble to fit in about five hundred chores, meetings and urgent items on my very long to-do list. Needless to say, by the end of Monday my brain must have taken on the appearance of a scrambled egg. I know this because by Tuesday I'd forgotten that I was supposed to be off and did a full day of work. A colleague who had been watching me slave away all day was a bit mystified by the time I decided to break up for dinner: "I thought you were off today", he said. I'm told the look on my face was priceless.

Anyway, I've spent the last week writing an article. See, we scientists get to call ourselves "authors" when we've published something in a scientific journal. This doesn't mean we necessarily have a degree in writing, or even an evening course in the art of prose. What it does mean, however, is that we've published something generally agreed by the science community to be an actual factual report on something we've discovered to be true. The process of publishing is harrowing: you write, double check, write, triple check, send the article around to various co-authors for quadruple checks, you re-write. And that's before you submit it to a journal. When you've submitted your work to a scientific journal, it goes through something called "peer-review", which is three or four experts from your area of research that check your article thoroughly. And when I say thoroughly, I mean thoroughly. They check your references, they check your spelling and grammar, your results, your statistics, your conclusions, everything. If there is even the slightest problem, you'll know. The article has to "pass" this peer-review before it is accepted to be published, often with heavy editing. The standards in the high-impact (highly rated) journals where everyone wants to publish are sky high. Did I tell you it's a harrowing experience?

So I'm a bit confused over the latest from Eric Asimov and Jancis Robinson. They seem to want to have a blogger and a writer be the same thing. I can't disagree more. My blogging is quite different in both style, research and execution than my writing for scientific journals. This blog is an opinion, a story and a very personal and subjective expression of experience. My writing for journals has very little to do with my personal opinions, it's all about indisputable facts. In the blog I can report what I've heard in the restaurant, on the street and in the blogosphere. I can't even begin to imagine the slamming I'd get if I wrote the following in a scientific article: "I heard from a friend that this is true, so that is what I base this article on". That is the big difference for me between printed media and blogs, the printed media publishes factual accounts of what's going on in the world - in a blog you can say what you please. I've really had enough of people calling themselves "food and wine writers" or "restaurant critics" and then two sentences later professing to know fuck-all about wine. By all means, be a blogger, but don't call yourself a critic. Criticism is quite the art (says the person who has had a lot of work with different peer-reviews) and it only really means something if you know what you're talking about.

(image from XKCD)