Why I Use a Pen Name

Using pseudonyms is not just about anonymity.

Photo by Jaroslav Devia on Unsplash

A short bit about myself: As you have already noticed by looking at my username, I write under a pen name. This has mainly two reasons that I want to cover a bit, so maybe I can help you decide on whether to use one yourself.

First off, one of the reasons I choose not to use my real name is of course anonymity. But my motivation behind that is not so much to guard my real self against personal attacks or criticism. Most of what I write here actually arises from conversations that I have in real life.

Contrary, it is rather about minimizing the influence of my life outside of Medium on my profile. This has to do with the topic that I came to write about most of the time: science.

Since sciences, especially natural sciences, have a very democratic way of dealing with criticism and other inputs, they have developed a mechanism of pre-assessing credibility in order to process all this feedback, which works through assigning standardized levels of competencies to people.

While this system — that you trust a professor more than a student and a student more than a layperson — works great most of the time, I want to undermine it for the time that you are reading articles like this one. They often cover meta-topics, where I think it adds to the thought process of the reader when they have to speculate about my level of competence in a field since it renders ad-hominem arguments useless.

The second thought that led me to use a pen name is a personal one: When I started to write on this platform about 4 months ago, I wanted to write for a year already but had a hard time deciding on what I should write about — even in which language.

By using a pseudonym, I found a workaround for this mental barrier, making sure that I wouldn’t skip topics I find interesting just because I think I need to create my own style or an online personality that fits my offline self.

And this hits a point that I would encourage every (new) writer to question about themselves: Are there topics that you’ve spared out because you thought they don’t fit you? Are there ideas you have thrown away just because they differ from “your” topics? If your answer is a clear yes, then I advise you to try out writing under a pseudonym.

If there is one thing that I’ve learned on this platform so far, then it’s this:

Writing is work, not art.

The art is what lies behind the words you type into your screen. But getting them to form sentences, free from expression errors and melodious to the reader's inner ears, is a craft that needs to be trained regularly.

So if you are a new writer struggling with discovering “your line”, just publishing whatever you feel like writing about under a pen name might be a good start. Naturally, you might see some recurring themes starting to crystallize, at which point you can still change your username.

Will I always be phi? I have no idea. But phi held my hand when I first set foot into the world of writing and for now, I think phi will accompany me for some more times to come.

If you are not yet, I would be honored to welcome you as a new Medium member via this link.