Drafted and Bound

 A bound copy of current draft of my thesis

I am in a strange place at the moment. After over a decade of working towards my thesis, I am in the position where I can not do anything for almost three weeks. It feels weird.

Over the last week I have been pulling my thesis together, sorting out small details, such as the bibliography, front papers and a list of figures, plus getting it in the right format for the University of Birmingham for when I submit it.

Of course as with all theses, just as I got to the end of the first print out the printer threw a fit and not one I could sort. A friend, thanks Dave, came and fiddled with it, eventually turning it off and on again and it started working. So on Tuesday afternoon I actually took it to local binders. This was to basically get a binding that enables the two people (my supervisor and a proof reader who has not read any of it before) to work easily with a paper copy of a long document. All the proof reading and correcting effort that has gone in over the last few weeks should pay off and make it a readable document for them.

Today I collected it from the local binders and put one copy in an envelope to send to my supervisor. The only thing was while doing that I went to demonstrate what happened if you changed computers and did not check through when working with Word (Word formats changes with printers that you are printing to, it is why much to my supervisors annoyance I have not numbered pages until now). However in doing so I found the figures were on far more different pages than I would expect. The reason being that I had actually changed the margins slightly and not then gone and checked the figures. Lesson learnt.

I then stopped off at the local Tesco and bought some reasonably priced sparkling wine. Then went along to my Local Post Office. It was shut for the morning. RETHINK.

So I went home and searched the web for alternative Post Offices. I found one in the city centre and so headed down there and put it in on special delivery. It is addressed to my supervisors official address, not to his actual office. So I sent him and email saying where I had sent it. Hopefully by Monday it will have been delivered to a place where he can collect it!

This blog is now going to go silent until my next supervision after which I will let you know what I still need to do.

Collating and Back to the Introduction

Books relating to Foucault

This weekend I have traced and proofed all my appendices.  I ended up with six appendices including a Bibliography. I have drafted and abstract which is 100 words too long (50%), so I am going to have to cut that down quite drastically and the big challenge is not to say succinctly what the study was but to say succinctly what the findings are. Then I have pulled the whole thesis together! This took up most of Friday.

So yesterday(Saturday) I pulled the whole thing together and did a lot of the formatting work. I now have a table of contents and also list of illustrations. I have called them illustrations but basically anything that is not pure text. So there is a table, several diagrams, a couple of photos and at least one drawing. I could find eleven in total.  What this means, is that I can finally do an exact count of the number of words in the text; 76,863 to be precise. This means that I have approximately 3,000 words to play with, maybe slightly more. The question is what are my priorities for these words. There are two, the first is to extend the section on Foucault in my introduction, not hugely but so that it actually makes an argument rather than just states the case. This has set me back to reading Foucault today. The second is to develop my conclusion.

There are however several other tidying-ups that need to  be done. One is highly related with the first, and that is to check through all the references to Foucault in my thesis and make sure they are consistently referencing the appropriate texts. The second is to find all the references to "I" and check they are appropriate and if not to remove them. I have removed some of them as I have been proof editing, but I am quite sure that some have got in. It is fine to write "I did X"; it is not fine to write "I think the second option". The first is a statement of what I did, the second is a hedging of bets. Then there is the Bibliography that needs to be sorted through and making sure it is coherent and correct. Plus putting in all the originally published information. Fortunately I have a six day weekend made up from annual leave next weekend.