A lo-ong weekend on thesis

Part of a local bench

Well this has been a long drawn out weekend working on thesis. It started on Thursday, and I really go back into work tomorrow. Two of the days were thesis days from work. These will be some of the last I ever do. I now have the text largely in proof! It is weird. This whole afternoon I have felt as if something very scary, but very exciting was happening. Now that I am actually pretty close the relief of having a proof version of the thesis text is like bubbles of champagne running through my veins.

It has not been easy even this weekend. I had a friends marriage go through major ructions and the husband ended up briefly sleeping on my floor for one night. I had a migraine at the start of the weekend, and I have had a mild infection or hayfever so did not go over to my parents.

Thursday and Friday only slow progress was made although I got the Worship chapter into proof. Saturday I tackled the Methodology chapter and I can see why my supervisor thought it was good. It was by far the easiest of all the chapters to refine into proof. However in the last three days I have struggled with the introduction and the conclusion. These are the shortest chapters of the thesis, yet they have taken more time and effort than some of the longer chapters which I was doing in a day and a half each,and these, at about the same length when put together, were took three.

However I still have to write the abstract, sort the appendices, put the text together and format it in the right form for the thesis and so on. I have a little time over the next three weeks to put these final touches in.

Half way through editing and I made even song

I got another two chapters in proof this weekend and I finished about 5:30 pm so I snatched a meal, briefly rang my parents and headed off to the Cathedral for Evening Prayer. Got there just in time, not quite the last in the door but almost and the Old Testament reading included:

For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept
line upon line, line upon line
here a little, there a little.

Hum it sounds like God has been doing some editing as well. When you here about editing it, sounds tedious and editing 80,000 words sounds very tedious. Well I am not finding it so. It is far more similar to doing a large puzzle when you know you have the basics worked out but you need to get everything exactly right. It is concentrated effort. I think there is one sentence that I rewrote three times today just to get it to express what I wanted it to say!

Writing has the satisfaction of producing

Drafting has the satisfaction of shaping it 

Editing has the satisfaction of getting it right.

Each satisfaction feels different and has a different downside. The fear when you are producing that the words will not come, the way that shaping a project just takes over the whole of your brain and the frustration of not getting things right.

There are times when all I want to do is go out and do something different, such as the time when Grammarly decided to forget that I had gone through a section deciding which words to use and therefore made me go through it again pressing the ignore button for twenty minutes. There are times when I look at a sentence and I can not make head nor tail of it, or if I can it is utterly irrelevant to what I am saying at that point in the chapter. There are also times when I wonder if I have gone through the same passage three times or whether there are three very similar sounding passages in what I have written. Repeated sentences are one of the trolls waiting to catch you out when you are drafting. Then there are times of utter frustration when you go to look up a quote and you find that instead of ordering a book, you have ordered a book about the book!

That said five chapters in draft, which leaves me worship, methodology, introduction and conclusion to go. That is four. Hoping I will be able to extend the long weekend next weekend so I can get all this done with a couple of work at home days.

 

Another Two Chapters down and I am getting used to Grammarly

Well I have gone through two more of my chapters and got them into final draft. I think I am close on 24 hours of work this weekend and maybe more. That is actual time working on them. The editing process is interesting. Anyone who has ever proof edited or read an unedited essay by me will know that there is something "odd" about the way I use language. Actually it has been known about ever since I was in school but in those days nobody thought that a bright child might have special learning needs.

That meant that I had to get over myself long before I started my PhD. It is also why all my essays were proof read. I am finally putting together a proofed version of my thesis. So far what I have done is to take the amendments by my proof editors, go through them and then put the whole thing through Grammarly. Now I put it through on academic settings and I am not slavish to the demands. For instance Grammarly will pick up any use of the passive voice. However in a lot of academic writing the passive voice is actually necessary. The other item is the use of impersonal second person pronoun instead of "one". Now I can introduce "one" into the text but really that sounds more artificial than "you". What Grammarly does not pick up is my nervous tick of using "I" when I want to say "this is my opinion, you are free to have yours but.." Most of the time I just need to remove them from the text.  There are legitimate uses of I, such as when writing about how I am going to structure the text but these apologetic-Is are not  good.

However probably far more useful than the grammar checker is the synonym suggestion. I go through each and everyone of those and this is necessary. The point is when you get to looking at synonyms you can only decide which are best when you have a clear idea what the sentence is saying and how that word works in the sentence. This has regularly drawn to my attention sentences that do not make sense. They might have perfectly good English grammar but they fail to convey any meaning. No doubt at some time in my brain those sentences meant something but it is not there now. So I have to sit down, work through in detail what the sentence probably originally said and recreate the sentence so it conveys something.

So far in draft are Tradition, Location and Flows. Next week I would like to tackle Community and Belonging, at least in part because I think there maybe overlap. The week after is the long weekend and must work out what time I want off to finish other the chapters. If I manage to keep this pace then I should be ready to send to my supervisor on time.

Hopefully one chapter in proof draft

I think I am competing for most boring thesis picture this week as I have put up a picture of what I hope is some of the text of my final thesis. Of course I have not anything significant, just a random bit of text and part of a picture. Yes I have managed to get the occasional picture into my thesis.

Actually the entire weekend has been spent trying to get that chapter into a proof form. This has been quite a task as there was some re-organisation left to do. So this weekend I first worked through my proof readers alterations, then went through and structurally reorganised it and finally went through with Grammarly with it. What Grammarly was annoying in two respects: it picked up uses of generic "you" which are entirely appropriate for the sort of academic writing I am doing and it also picked up the passive which is used a lot more in academic writing than in general writing. I just told it to ignore the first and I had a go at removing the second but did not worry too much if I simply could not.

However it very usefully had an error that it called "Too Wordy". I think it was intended to catch too flowery language. However what it ended up doing was picking up sentences which were what I would call run on sentences. That meant at the start of the sentence I was writing one sentence and at the end I was writing the next sentence. The cojoined twins of the sentence universe. They usually made no sense at all. I needed to separate the two sentences and make sure each said what I intended it to say.

Anyway I have sent the chapter back to one of my proof readers to see if all this concentration on detail has actually made the chapter better or has destroyed the structure.

Oh it is the chapter on flows which is probably the hardest chapter to write well as it crosses the boundary between science and social science. This makes the choice of language interesting as I need to use words differently in different parts of the chapter.