I have sent my reverse outline to my Supervisor

Thesis Outline

Well today was the deadline for getting a plan together for my thesis rewrite. That meant that I needed to get the reverse outlining. Reverse outlining is depressing as it shows you all the glitches in your thesis. It is also very time consuming. That outline is so tall and thin because I have gone down to the concept level. That has meant writing one and two line descriptions for every couple of paragraphs. A thesis contains a lot of paragraphs.

The big problem is that I have done quite a lot of thinking around the belonging chapter, and I am finding that I am intrigued by the whole process. Oddly enough there are ideas out there which seem worth looking at. I am wondering if Lefebvre approach to Space might be worth generalising to other concepts. If that is the case then we have a complex process to consider. Most thinkers seem to approach it either with a top down or a bottom up process and see it single direction. Some of the better thinkers seem to see it as involving both. What Lefebvre does is then to say but there is also a process of negotiation, a process by which the two technologies tie themselves together. The problem is that he deals solely with Space, and his conceptualisation is related to Space. I am also less tied to the central organisation as supporting an ideological dominant discourse.

I am finding Scrivener interesting. The re-organisation with it is not something I would have liked to try with Word. I would have either been moving paragraphs around between multiple documents or trying to do it with a single large document that was my full thesis. Even on my quite powerful computers at home and work Word only grudgingly would do it for me.

However there is a big snag, it has dropped all my links to my citation database. This means every single one of them will have to be recreated by hand before I can create the bibliography properly. I only did it because Mendeley was saying I could cite anyway even though there was no plug in. I have tried, and it does work well at all. However,I am finding ways around bits I did not think it was going to handle. The result is I am working out a new workflow that will get me to a final version that is good enough for submission. It involves working first in Scrivener, exporting chapters to Word, going through with Grammarly and putting in references. Then send to proof readers, so my readers are dealing with more structural issues.

Oh submission date looks like it is February or March now. It depends on what state my thesis is in, in January. The idea being to get the first three chapters into form by the end of November and then over Christmas and New Year to blitz the remaining six (this is not as daft as it seems, three of the chapters now just need reshaping in quite specific ways).

Oh I need a new title and I seem to be unable to get my head around that.