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.

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.

Half way through editing and I made even song

I got another two chapters in proof this weekend and I finished about 5:30 pm so I snatched a meal, briefly rang my parents and headed off to the Cathedral for Evening Prayer. Got there just in time, not quite the last in the door but almost and the Old Testament reading included:

For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept
line upon line, line upon line
here a little, there a little.

Hum it sounds like God has been doing some editing as well. When you here about editing it, sounds tedious and editing 80,000 words sounds very tedious. Well I am not finding it so. It is far more similar to doing a large puzzle when you know you have the basics worked out but you need to get everything exactly right. It is concentrated effort. I think there is one sentence that I rewrote three times today just to get it to express what I wanted it to say!

Writing has the satisfaction of producing

Drafting has the satisfaction of shaping it 

Editing has the satisfaction of getting it right.

Each satisfaction feels different and has a different downside. The fear when you are producing that the words will not come, the way that shaping a project just takes over the whole of your brain and the frustration of not getting things right.

There are times when all I want to do is go out and do something different, such as the time when Grammarly decided to forget that I had gone through a section deciding which words to use and therefore made me go through it again pressing the ignore button for twenty minutes. There are times when I look at a sentence and I can not make head nor tail of it, or if I can it is utterly irrelevant to what I am saying at that point in the chapter. There are also times when I wonder if I have gone through the same passage three times or whether there are three very similar sounding passages in what I have written. Repeated sentences are one of the trolls waiting to catch you out when you are drafting. Then there are times of utter frustration when you go to look up a quote and you find that instead of ordering a book, you have ordered a book about the book!

That said five chapters in draft, which leaves me worship, methodology, introduction and conclusion to go. That is four. Hoping I will be able to extend the long weekend next weekend so I can get all this done with a couple of work at home days.

 

Another Chapter in Second Draft off to my Supervisor

Cherry Blossom

This weekend has been a bank holiday, so of course I stuck the extra day into my writing schedule. The weather has been glorious and with the sunshine the cherry blossom is out in profusion.  Also the Peregrines eggs have hatched in Sheffield and between writing I have watched bits of that. The other advantage of this day was that it meant that I did not feel badly going out for dinner yesterday as I still had today to write. It is funny how writing grows to fill the time you have for it! I was really getting through it on Friday, it slowed on Saturday and today if anything has been slower.

Actually this chapter has been interesting to write. There were three different threads that I have been interweaving in the chapter. On the one level there was the story of a particular Church meeting; the next one that I had to tackle was the actual ways identity was created within the congregation. I think I mainly kept that in but I might have missed something on welcome which might need to go into the last section. There is space for it and yes I know that putting welcome at the end is not quite the right place for it. The final bit was I had to weave together the argument that congregation as community involved both institutional, discursive and emotional systems. Just to make this interesting also to include the way that the whole situation interacts with the tradition so I suppose I am wrong and it is four threads I am plaiting with.

I was struggling with writing this morning, another blog posted on the URC site a link to his latest blog in which he asked whether the URC was depressed.  An interesting question, so many got upset about the analogy and felt it was insulting to mental illness. Now I am quite open about the fact I have (had) depression at a mild to moderate level. I also had the smiling sort. I am not insulted, basically because fairly early on in the journey I had to think what I was experiencing in my local congregation.  The best explanation I can think of is that the communal discourse reflected very strongly many aspects depressive thinking. Now I know depressive thinking is odd, it can be switched on and off and changing mood does seem to do that. However it is also true that changing the thinking can change the mood. That is how CBT works. I have discussed this with a variety of people this and nearly always they see what I am getting at, indeed on at least one occasion I someone asking precisely about this.

The problem however was I was writing the emotional part of the chapter and of course the emotional part of the chapter connects with the blog post. So I was jumping between the two and not really making much sense of either. In the end I had to be disciplined over Facebook and just concentrate on writing.

There is one problem I have not got the right title for the chapter yet. Maybe my supervisor will suggest it!

Getting back into the flow of writing after a short break

Yes that is my desk, it at times gets clearer but then books and stuff land back on it! I should perhaps admit that I also have a main computer on a different table just off to the side where I am doing most of my writing. I am at the stage where the effort to clear the desk is more than I can find time to do at one swoop while doing thesis. The book shelves are actually getting more sorted and when I am finished I am promising myself a proper sort out.

Anyway this weekend I have actually had quite a good session on writing up, that is I think I have achieved in the last two and a half days what I intended to achieve. That is I have managed to get a draft 2 version of the chapter on flows and it has started to hang together. I have also started the reorganisation of the chapter on community. That means that next weekend if I continue working fluently I may manage to get that also into draft, which makes it totally reasonable to have a good go at the chapter on worship.  I still need to loose words but not many.

The big challenge is the chapter on methodology. Actually now that I have my examiner I suspect that is coming more straightforward and I should actually manage to do it. Oh I have found something out, that like driving, I get less easily distracted when writing if I have music on.

Actually I suspect supervision was a turning point. That is my brain has taken the step of think that I am actually in the last stages. That means three things: firstly to some extent my concentration has improved, I have actually started looking through the process of submission and secondly I am actually beginning to think slightly more realistically about what will come afterwards. One thing I have discovered is that I can submit in any font I want to as long as it is clear. That in some way has got the visual part of my brain working. Now do not get me wrong I do not want an outlandish font, but I do want to give it some consideration.

Another query, I seem to recall somewhere that Marilynne Robinson talks of her own congregation as her village. Unfortunately I suspect I picked this up off the radio, does anyone know a reference to anything similar.

July's Supervision - Another Chapter in Main Draft

Showroom Cinema from the station on my return to Sheffield

Somehow the way storm and light were playing over the Showroom seemed to me rather evocative of today hence this picture. Well the community chapter can now go into draft status which means I am free to get on with the one on worship. There are problems with it, and the major one is that I need to find a way of connecting description with theory. I have the theory, I have the description and I even have the theoretical understanding of what it going on in the description but I am not managing to get the final part down on the page. Some of this I know is due to scale, I sort of know how to use description to balance an argument in an article of 3,000 words, but when it comes to across a chapter of say 15000 words I am struggling, let alone across a thesis of 70-80,000 words.

I am beginning to have some idea of how to cord that might run usefully through the thesis and connect it, and it comes back to the tradition intriguingly and stray comments at the Exploring Reformed Spiritualities conference. David Cornick commented that the Reformed tradition was a very “we” tradition in passing. I happen to agree with him, at least with respect to the URC take on the Reformed tradition but something troubled me about his need to assert it.

Sitting back I was aware that I experience rather a lot of credulousness when I express this view in ecumenical setting. The normal response is the Reformed tradition is anything but a “we” tradition. So self perception and external perception differ. The answer, as my fellow “we”-Reformer will have guessed, is the group that normally is seen as Reformed and loudly proclaim themselves as that, often being very sure that they are the one true interpreter of the tradition. 

These often have a very evangelical and very “I” take on the Reformed tradition. Often this includes an emphasis on the conversion experience, personal morality rather than social and the individual interpreting the Bible in a personal and surface manner. They are loud, they are arrogant and they get up our noses more than any other sort of Christian as they hotly question our Reformed credentials. At times it is hardly surprising we want to return the compliment. However in actuality they get under our skin part because they are Reformed, in some sense we understand what they are saying in ways we do not understand what others are saying, your highly ritualistic Anglo-Catholic where everything is by the book seems to us ridiculous in a way these never do.

My conclusion is that we have to take seriously this “I”-Reformed Spirituality and see if we can actually work out why the “I” reading of the tradition is so very different from the “we” one. The other challenge is that it is too simple to see one congregation as “I” and one as “we” rather they are balancing the two strands which are actually very twisted together in English Reformed Dissenting tradition, there is nothing pure about us. Thus both congregations are finding different ways to understand who they are in relationship to the tradition and creating their own balance between the “I” and the “we”.

Apart from that I have largely dodged the showers and found that one of the shops on campus sold liquorice toffee, so bought a small amount. Next challenge is to get a rough draft of worship chapter and to read up on sociology of worship, now can I find my supervisors book?