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.