Back into editing after holiday

A tree with red rather
than brown leaves

Well I am back in Sheffield, and I am back to editing. This weekend I have started to edit the chapter on flows. This is the chapter that came out of the final position and has now moved into the first chapter.

The picking up was hard, I had taken a complete break while away. However this weekend I have managed to slowly work through it. I also spent some time watching videos on Fluid Dynamics as a way to fairly quickly get back into the metaphor. The problem was that it pointed out to me ways that I had stretched the metaphor which do not exactly work. So there was quite a bit of rewriting to do.

There was also a lot of cutting that needed doing. When it was at the end of the thesis I had to pull bits from the description chapters into this chapter to connect. Now I have to do it the other way around and draw on the metaphor when I come to working in those chapters. I also had to rewrite totally the conclusion to this chapter as it was doing the wrong thing.

However, my break has clarified two things. Firstly this chapter is arguing that the metaphor is important to the way a subject is understood and therefore we need to be a lot more clear about our metaphors. Secondly my three descriptive chapters will each pick up one of the elements of the metaphor I have picked up in this chapter. Thus giving them an analytic as well as a descriptive function within the thesis. This was clearly lacking in what I have written previously and works quite easily with the rewritten chapters.

Back from Holiday and time to be getting back to writing

Well that is Dora shaking her head telling me not to do it, she would really rather I stayed up with her and took her for long walks at least twice a week. I do not own her, but she seems to think I am the fun senior female in her pack.

Anyway I am back from holiday, and though I am not going to post a word count this week as though my official length has changed somewhat it is quite small. However I have spent lots of time preparing for writing the central bit of my chapter on belonging. This is important. It seems to me that at the core of a congregations identity is the question "What does it mean to belong?" That is both a question congregation try to decide for themselves and one that individuals negotiate as individuals. What I have therefore to do is demonstrate the "work" that both congregations and individuals do to sustain that sense of belonging or not belonging. For anything to be defined there must be a boundary but often that boundary is mutable and changes according to situation.

I have spent the mornings of my holiday trawling through the descriptive chapters looking for bits and pieces that are there that relate to this work. I am hoping that that lays a good groundwork for writing  as I need to write 6,000 words next weekend so as to have the belonging chapter drafted. So I will be in thesis purdah. I expect I will do it but it is going to take an effort.

Week 47: Writing up cut short due to holiday

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	77,350
Words typed this week:	1082
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	1082
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Well just over a thousand words is not good progress but the fact I was writing every day made a difference. It did not produce words but it did get me to go in specific directions. The first draft is awfully bitty and I expect to have to do some serious organising of the theory section when I get back but I think I have down all I want to say even if it is not a smoothly created argument yet. I still have one theorist to put in but there is space for him.

The really good news is that I think I have sorted out what social constructionism actually is and therefore I can argue that it looks specifically at the work that is done by members of the congregation in order to create the tradition/discourse/flow that is the identity of the congregation. I am therefore in a position to go on holiday and do the work abstracting the stuff from my descriptive sections with which to organise around the central arguments of this chapter. I am going to be a lot more explicit about my interpretation in this chapter and see if that works better. I have about 5000 words to do it in and I am still trying to organise my thoughts about how best to tackle it. I suspect in three pieces. The first that looks at the types of behaviour that are associated with belonging. The second which looks at the ways people actually signal their belonging and the third that looks at the ways the community invites people to belong and marks boundaries.

Now I really do need to think about doing something about getting organised for holiday properly!