The Blog Project: 10 Years of Improving My English

I’ve focused on improv­ing my English for ten years.

Ten years ago today, I hopped on a plane to go and live in New York. 

“Go and live” was optim­ist­ic, giv­en that I had nowhere to sleep when I landed; I had to put down my agency’s address as my home address. 

The flight from Stockholm Arlanda Airport to Newark International Airport took over ten hours, so I had time to think. I thought mostly about one thing:

How much I needed to improve my English.
Finding some­place to live was a sec­ond­ary concern.

I was already an estab­lished PR pro­fes­sion­al in Sweden with reput­able exper­i­ence advising glob­al cli­ents. Like most Swedes, I spoke English well enough for every­day situations.

The issue was that much of my pro­fes­sion­al con­fid­ence ori­gin­ated from being a fast and robust writer in Swedish.

Writing well in Swedish was how it all star­ted for me. The oppor­tun­ity to make a liv­ing by writ­ing drew me into pub­lic rela­tions in the first place. 

I had this feel­ing that the team in New York were expect­ing me to do what I had been doing so well in Sweden in America. 

But I knew that my busi­ness English wasn’t up to par.

The abil­ity to express one­self cre­at­ively is born out of a sense of free­dom to exper­i­ment con­fid­ently using words and sen­tences as “will­ing” build­ing blocks. If you only have one rudi­ment­ary set of build­ing blocks, that free­dom to roam disappears.

The team in New York prob­ably had no idea how much of my use­ful­ness came from being a sol­id writer… in Swedish.

C’est la vie. English was like my non-exist­ing liv­ing situ­ation; anoth­er thing I would have to fig­ure out once the plane touched the ground. 

During that ten-hour flight, I decided to retire my Swedish blog (“Doktor Spinn”) and breathe life into Doctor Spin, a PR blog in English.

I had no inten­tion of run­ning a PR blog for the sake of run­ning a PR blog. I just wanted some­where to prac­tise writ­ing busi­ness English. The pro­pos­i­tion of being indexed by search engines — and then found by inter­ested read­ers — only served to intro­duce accountability.

Read also: I Was Blogging Before, During, and Long After It Was Cool

Friends and col­leagues thought launch­ing an English blog was a stra­tegic move. As an NYC-based PR adviser and star­tup COO, maybe blog­ging in English was a cal­cu­lated attempt at scal­ing my per­son­al brand. Of course, it wasn’t, but I nev­er cor­rec­ted any­one about this, either. 

I just kept writ­ing to improve my English.

Today, after ten years of focused effort, I declare this pro­ject finalised.

The pro­ject isn’t done because I’ve some­how learnt enough. It’s done in the sense that I can now express myself freely. I’ve reached a point of dimin­ish­ing returns, even. 

I will nev­er be as good a writer as I am in Swedish, but the con­fid­ence in using English is there now — and that was the whole point of this dec­ade-long exercise.

In any case, I’ll con­tin­ue to blog in English. Not because I must prac­tice but because Doctor Spin is a PR blog writ­ten in English now.

As I close the books on this pro­ject, do I have any insight to share with you? Well, get­ting an apart­ment in New York City took three days. This English pro­ject took ten years. 

That’s just the way these things work, I suppose.

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