Well not quite there with Worship

My aim a fortnight ago was to get my worship chapter off to my supervisor by today. I have not achieved this and it will have to wait now until next weekend. That said it is now in a full draft but I need to go through and do the grammar checking and the bibliography. I have the feeling that I am going to have to cite people a lot more often than they are in the text already. I reference ideas by phrases repeated and suspect I need to cite the originator every time I do it.

There are reasons for my delay. Firstly most of last weekend was taken up with writing the an appendix which took very straightforward stuff out of the chapter that was comparative between Ulverstane and St Andrew's Edgerton. This involved a statistical analysis and a detailed qualitative one of hymns.

Secondly just before Christmas I got back my notes from the majority of the sermons I listened too while on placement. This meant I could finally do some sort of an analysis of them. It was interesting, my notes are pictorial (the picture is from one of them) . There is however a symbolic system in them and by spreading them out by time with images used I got a feel for themes and how they were spread through the year. For instance Easter day always had an empty tomb. Sometimes it was obvious that they were exposition on a single passage, other times they worked around a theme.  However because they were pictures I was making links between elements in the drawing and also across drawings. Actually by the time I had spent several hours on it I had plenty to write.

The third reason is I decided last week that is was time I put some effort into sorting my finances out. No real problems but they have not been as efficiently managed as I would like. That took up a couple of hours on Friday and left me very tired and whacked.

If I am honest it is a lot better than it was and now I think has a cohesive story. I also think it has got shorter. So I am hoping that when sent my supervisor will be happy with it. I have been doing pomodoro and on the whole it has kept me relatively well focused. However that does not work when referencing and doing the grammar. I expect that by next Saturday at the latest I will have the chapter off to my supervisor.

Another chapter off to Supervisor

Been working: therefore an untidy desk

Sorry about not writing last weekend. No I was not taking a break, but at some stage over the weekend my brain clicked and I started to know where I was going with my chapter on community. The result was that I worked late on the Sunday on the chapter and really wanted to continue working on it on the Monday but worked called and it was a busy week. I was straight back into teaching even though it is not term time (I train researchers not students). The odd thing is that even when I am not actively doing my doctorate I am still working on it. Anyway in the middle of this I decided I need to put a statistical analysis into the appendix rather than leave it in place. However that is for the worship chapter.

I have a problem with my next chapter and the way my supervisor wants me to edit it requires quite a bit of rejigging and a change of focus, especially if my edits on my previous chapter have worked. The thing was that it was like suddenly finding my voice and knowing how I wanted to write. This makes editing a lot quicker and more enjoyable. The odd thing is that in some ways I have started doing what my supervisor originally wanted me to do. That said I was also right, writing like this is not easy, I needed all the pedestrian writing I have done in the months inbetween. The thing is that I had to familiarize myself with the material to a far greater degree than I think I suspected.

That should not have been a surprise. The fact is that ethnographers say that familiarization is essential. However, most people do their familiarization in a very different way to how I did. They do it by repeated reading of notes. I took to inhabiting imaginatively and theoretically the space that the notes created. My method of doing it was to write. Indeed I probably have still under written, I probably needed to write about double my word count for my first draft. The theoretical stuff needed only to be written about the right length as it is the stuff you keep returning as you do further drafts but the descriptive stuff probably need a doubling or more in length. I did not realise when I started writing my thesis that I would need to overwrite.

Anyway I have sent the communication to my supervisor. This time because of this step up I have asked him to give me some indication of what he thinks of the chapter as this will mean that I will know what to do with my next chapter. There are two options: he likes it, in which case I do the same thing with the next chapter, he does not like it, in which case I need to do a massive rethink. The problem is that I know there is really no middle course.