Thesis Watch
I think I might finally have broken through that pesky writer's block. I think this might be down to the fact that my practical work (digits crossed) is almost complete. So no more returning home, trying to explain why my hands have brightly coloured splotches on (I have small hands, gloves too big, chemical dyes, you get the picture).
While all I currently have is my Methods & Materials and an incomplete bare-bones draft of my Intro, I finally feel something is being accomplished. About time too!!!!!! Now if I could only remember how to spell Pharoah correctly, I'd be away.
Word count: 4128 (That's 20% of thet minimum word count. Much typing ahead, so glad I invested in a new keyboard!)
3 Comments:
I found that my rate of writng increased exponentially. Once you start to get your bare bones down, you find that you start making notes of more and more stuff that needs to be written. My PhD thesis was absolutely filled with bright red sentences saying "Expand more" or three word titles for new sub-chapters. Even the official 80,000 word maximum for a PhD thesis suddenly seems like too little once you hit your stride.
My advice - don't break your flow by getting bogged down with too many details when you first write a new section. Make good use of the red font colour to mark out pieces of text to come back to. If you're on a roll, keep on going, you can always verify a reference or perfect the wording on a sloppy paragraph later.
There is also a lot of satisfaction to be had when you come back to fill in the blanks and slowly see that red text vanish and a scruffy looking collection of broken sentences morph into a neat paragraph, complete with reference manager tags just waiting to be formatted!
sounds like sanescientist has the answers. It all sounds like good advice to me!
You're making progress, I'd still be stuck probably!
When is your deadline?
Thanks for the advice Sane. I appreciate it. I already have lots of brackets with 'REF!!!' written in. As referencing is my least favourite part of writing.
My deadline is he 8th September but what with printing and binding I need to be finished about the 3rd week of August. So not really all that long!!
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