Getting there, or editing is now over

Paper Ready for Printing

Well I went wild on Friday and bought two reams of paper for printing out my doctorate. That was my way of encouraging myself to actually finish the proof review of my thesis.
Friday I spent quite a bit of time getting the chapters on Community and Worship up to standard. Then Saturday I spent the whole day trying to remove words from the chapters on Location, Community and Worship. In the end I gave up and removed a section. However, I shortly afterwards spotted that my chapter on Belonging length included the Bibliography at the end. This gave me enough space to put it back in and I am about 500 words under my word limit of 80,000. Actually I might be quite a bit lower than that as I am at present counting labels to charts and graphs but I would say less than 0.5% off the total is not bad.

Oh one little detail, I describe at one point someone going out for a "fag-break". Now I know that technically that should be "cigarette-break" but I have never heard that used by anyone. The break is always a "fag -break" whether it is people going for one or people talking about someone going for one. So my decision was to leave it in that form in my thesis.

Today I have been working through the chapter on Belonging and the Conclusion. These were far more finalised than the rest although it looked as if my English was more unconventional in the Belonging chapter. So the text for submission is now finalised, now all I need to do is the mechanics of laying it out, getting all the papers in the right order and printing. Oh I do have one more piece to write and that is simply the piece that is for acknowledgements. So one of my jobs this week is to look through other people's acknowledgements and to record them.  Apart from that I will be doing my best not to become hyper over referencing styles and layouts. One job next weekend is to check every single reference in the thesis and make sure the references look right. I have well over two hundred references.

This feels very strange and I suspect the feeling will continue to build as I go through the next ten days that are before submission.

Starting Submission Proof and Tough Decisions

Raindrops from the storm this afternoon

Well I am further on than I thought I would be although not as far as I hoped at times this weekend. However my brain has declared that it is not going to do any more tonight thank you. In particular it is not going to do any more complex thinking about how different parts of my thesis link together.

I am also beginning to get the process of submitting under control. I have now found out that I belong to a class which allows me to submit my thesis (and I have until 31st August but I want it in before Easter). I have also discovered that my mail account at Birmingham was full. This was why I was getting emails in my GMail box saying an Outlook account was full. It made no sense to me at all until I looked on a tablet and realised they were redirected from my Birmingham account. I have it set up to automatically redirect to my GMail account so I do not miss anything and as I never use that account apart from receiving email from Birmingham it never occurred to me that it might be full. So this morning the first half hour was spent deleting email that I had read when forwarded to me.

However proofing is interesting. There are more changes than I would like despite everyone assuring me that it is just proof reading. Also I am 2.5k over my word limit. Now there are two ways of dealing with this. Firstly to go through the whole thesis and remove bits that are embellishments. I have to be careful as if I do too much it ends up loosing cohesion.  The second is to loose specific bits. I have identified one bit that can go and would take me just under the limit. It adds something to thesis but not much as most of the argument is established in the previous section. This just demonstrates that the process happens within as well as external to the premises. I need to think about it.

Anyway with 5.5 chapters in proof I am on track for finishing proofing the chapters next weekend and sorting this out so I have a final text. Then I can start collating everything and working through that to get it into a final form.

Hopefully the changes done

Daffodils bought by a colleague Sue to mark the fact I had permission to submit

This weekend has actually gone pretty well despite the kettle dying on me. Kettle dying is a major calamity as it makes it hard to make the copious amounts of tea, herbal teas and coffee I drink while working on my thesis. So yesterday I had an unexpected trip down to Waitrose to buy a new one. I know that at times both of the small local supermarkets sell them but I could not recall any recently and it is not quite the time of year for them.

Friday I did the bit I could not do last weekend because I did not have the books. It was quite fun and as always the nuanced take in the book had been vastly simplified by the literature around. So while I did not need to alter my argument I did need to alter precisely what I said about this author.  I also think I made other corrections to the worship chapter than my supervisor wanted.

So yesterday and today were making changes to the next but last chapter. I found today I have lost an article I read, it was definitely by Fredrik Barth, it was fairly recent 1989-2005 I would guess, and it dealt with boundaries and the negotiated nature with boundaries. What makes it stand out from other work from him is that it included an account of the renegotiation of a boundary by a woman who had struggled. I remember her story and the way she was able to define herself in a different way particularly vis-a -vis her mother-in-law. However it is not in any of the four books/articles I have to hand that are clearly by Fredrik Barth.  I have a possible place of one but that is £70 and while if I knew it was the right one I might pay that, for something so chancy I am not.So I have altered the text.

Any way the major work was making explicit when I was using ideas from the flows chapter to work later in my thesis. This can be done a number of ways. I have opted at the moment for putting references back to the chapter and using the language deliberately when I am using the ideas. However my supervisor may want me to do a section on flows. Other than that it was making the corrections my supervisor wanted and generally tidying up. One funny story, I had to put a page reference in for a "Religion since 1945: Believing but not Belonging" by Grace Davie, I started hunting for it and found a section that would do. Then realised the book I was looking at was "Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates" also by Grace Davie. So I got out the right book and found the section which was a lot easier to find.

I have also this evening have emailed my volunteer proof-editors (James, Ruth and Margo) checking where they are up to, sending a copy of the belonging chapter as it had lots of small changes to it and hopefully Ruth has not started it yet. Also I emailed them the form that has to be signed by them and handed in with my thesis. As I know their character I also sent in a copy of the regulations that requires it.

So next weekend I take pedantry to the next level when I set about creating the submission version of my thesis.

Starting the final straight to submission

Well after the excitement of getting permission to submit this weekend was time to settle down and start the process. It is one thing to have permission it is quite another to get the work done. I have had one day off (as after the stress of teaching and a supervision I worked out that the chance my brain would do anything productive on Friday was zilch and my guess was about right).

I have had one productive day which was Saturday when I managed to get the chapter of tradition worked around as my supervisor had suggested and back to him to check that it was ok. For those who are proof reading please do not worry I am not going to expect you to proof read these last set of changes. The interesting thing is it involved the removal of a piece. I have mixed feelings about this, at this stage I accept I needed to remove it. The other option really would have been to expand it considerably as the actual problem is I need to give a lot more information for it to work. However, I am right up against my word limit so doing that was not really an option. Actually I cut it out then saved it in another file so when I go from writing a PhD to writing a book (I hope) I can use it as a basis of the expansion that I will need to do. I have rather a large chapter on  methodology and probably could turn it into a couple of papers but it will not be part of a book.

The final day has been poor and I am going to have to catch it up during the week. I need to write a short piece about a specific researcher somewhere  in my thesis. It needs to be there because I use him a significant amount and I have not put what I am using in context. That means a paragraph or so maybe 500 words. Sounds easy with a thesis 80,000 words but it isn't. The thing is that the piece relies on a specific book. My supervisor insisted I had the book, checked today and it was as I thought, no sign of the book. What is more there is a good reason for that. The book is out of print and I think when I have looked in the past pretty expensive to buy secondhand. Of course it is not on Kindle and Google books has managed to chop all the bits I need to read out. So I have bought it. Actually I have bought it twice and I hope one copy arrives. I have also been distracted looking at stuff on the sociology of Prayer for a friend. (Hint: the stuff is very limited.) Actually I have written most of what I want to say and I think that it will be the matter of an hour or so next weekend if I manage to get some reading done in the week.

The other thing for this week is to book time off so I can actually go through the process of submitting it without glitches. That will be several days at the start of April. So a busy thesis week ahead but no excursions out of Sheffield.

Permission to Submit

Today I have had a supervision again. l know December is a long time ago.However if you have been following this blog you will know l have been anything but inactive. The last few months have seen me rewrite seven chapters of my thesis. Today therefore was tine to review these and indeed the whole thesis and see if it was ready for submission.

The day dawned fair, and I woke early but not ridiculously so. It is funny how if you start early then you run early for a good part of the day. The result was that despite taking a leisurely pace down to the station I just missed the train before the one I planned to get. I did not race to get it choosing to drink a coffee on the platform after all the trains seemed to be running time. The next one left on time, and I found my seat. However l had forgotten that there were rail works around Dronfield and therefore the train took the scenic route around South Sheffield. Now the problem with being late on the hints in if less than 10 min you keep your slot but longer than that and you start to get delayed by other trains. We lost just over ten minutes by the time we got to Derby birth the result that we were over half an hour late into New Street. So I emailed my Supervisor to say l might be late. However, the train came in onto platform 11a and the trains out to the University often go from 11b. l think l must have had close to the shortest change time possible at New Street; I got off one train, ran the distance of about a carriage length then got on the next just before the doors started to beep for leaving. I would guess less than one minute all told. The result was I made up most of the tune I had lost.

The supervision was long. A lot of checking is needed as o need to do things such as reference back through the thesis both when I use ideas I have already talked about and when I muse a reference to an idea by a specific author. l also need to go through and put quote marks around a lot of technical terms used by theorists. There are three pieces that need doing.

• There is an introductory piece in the chapter on the Reformed Tradition that needs largely removing.
• There is a small section on Anthony Cohen that needs putting into the chapter on worship 
• There is a the need to hook through the Belonging chapter to make the connections with earlier chapters clear. 

Then it is proofing, Bibliography and layout. So my plan is to submit the 8th April. I think that gives me five weekends to get it into a final form for examining.

The rest of the time was talking about what next.It is a bigger problem than most people think as l do not fit any of the standard patterns for Phd students as I am in some ways a mature researcher with many years experience from my day job. l certainly have fresh questions that l would like to explore but how? l will need tin to think over the next year when my brain is not totally consumed with academic study.

The daffodils in the photo were tiny about four inches high. That said spring was definitely More advanced in Birmingham than at home. However you can see Old Joe clock tower the in background so definitely Birmingham.

All but the Bibliography

Today I have sent off my conclusion, appendices, abstract and title to my supervisor. That means he has everything that is part of my thesis. That means he has been looking at it this weekend to see if it hangs together. Now the re-write has been about working through all the chapters in order so as to create a narrative that holds them together. I could not have told you at the start what the narrative is, but by the end it was there. Indeed it was so clearly there I was able to write the abstract. The abstract is a real challenge as it has to be under 200 words. My thesis is around 80,000. That means the abstract ism 0.25% of the length of the thesis. To condense the thesis down to that length requires real focus on what are the essentials of the research.  So I am pretty confident that I have a decent last draft.

It is not perfect. The major defect at this stage as far as I can see is part of my final chapter is at present in the conclusion. It needs to go into the final chapter and then the conclusion actually needs stuff in it that is a step back. The reason is that I am talking still about what I am finding and not stepping back and trying to spell out what I am contributing to a topic. What I hope I am contributing is a way to start to treat social systems as if they are dynamic particularly congregations. Oh Social Sciences know that the systems are dynamic and that they change with time. Theorists such as Kuhn and Gramsci have done that for the large scale shifts and many people have suggested that small scale also change. However the work when it comes about is mainly static, we are trying to capture what happens at one instance and think that direction does not matter.

My conclusion therefore is we need to deal with direction, it is never enough just to look at where we are, we need to have some idea of where we are going and how we are going to get there. Actually let me reorder those questions, only through knowing how we are moving can we begin to know where we are heading. I have discovered just one process among many that are in action to shape the congregations identity. The process is not determinative, it does not say we will definitely go in a particular direction. Indeed I would argue that eventual destination is unpredictable.  However it does start to look at what is going on and why it is going on.

I wanted to take one of the primroses that are out in the local park but by the time I had the pieces sent to my supervisor it was raining. So I have taken an old daffodil photo I took a couple of years back. Daffodils are not out here yet (unlike crocuses and primroses but their leaves are showing above the ground).