Well not quite there with Worship

My aim a fortnight ago was to get my worship chapter off to my supervisor by today. I have not achieved this and it will have to wait now until next weekend. That said it is now in a full draft but I need to go through and do the grammar checking and the bibliography. I have the feeling that I am going to have to cite people a lot more often than they are in the text already. I reference ideas by phrases repeated and suspect I need to cite the originator every time I do it.

There are reasons for my delay. Firstly most of last weekend was taken up with writing the an appendix which took very straightforward stuff out of the chapter that was comparative between Ulverstane and St Andrew's Edgerton. This involved a statistical analysis and a detailed qualitative one of hymns.

Secondly just before Christmas I got back my notes from the majority of the sermons I listened too while on placement. This meant I could finally do some sort of an analysis of them. It was interesting, my notes are pictorial (the picture is from one of them) . There is however a symbolic system in them and by spreading them out by time with images used I got a feel for themes and how they were spread through the year. For instance Easter day always had an empty tomb. Sometimes it was obvious that they were exposition on a single passage, other times they worked around a theme.  However because they were pictures I was making links between elements in the drawing and also across drawings. Actually by the time I had spent several hours on it I had plenty to write.

The third reason is I decided last week that is was time I put some effort into sorting my finances out. No real problems but they have not been as efficiently managed as I would like. That took up a couple of hours on Friday and left me very tired and whacked.

If I am honest it is a lot better than it was and now I think has a cohesive story. I also think it has got shorter. So I am hoping that when sent my supervisor will be happy with it. I have been doing pomodoro and on the whole it has kept me relatively well focused. However that does not work when referencing and doing the grammar. I expect that by next Saturday at the latest I will have the chapter off to my supervisor.

A Quick Note having got Belonging chapter back in Second Draft

This week has seen better progress than last week. I will not get chance to work on thesis tomorrow as there is a big do at church to say farewell to our minister as she is leaving including lunch. I will find it exhausting and I have other jobs to tackle such as sorting out the duties for communion for the following week. Anyway I have got the chapter on Belonging into a form which I think my supervisor would prefer. That is I have mixed the theory in with the theorizing. This I hope will go a long way towards making clear what I am arguing and that although separate one is always informing the other.

The other thing that I have done is to add a final section. This was perhaps the most fun part of the writing as it was taking what I had observed and relating it to two wider sets of ideas. This is actually the sort of writing I have done quite a bit when preparing supervisory papers during my doctorate and is in my opinion fun. The two sets of ideas I was dealing with were the pairing of believing and belonging by Grace Davie and the work of James Hopewell on Congregations and how their identity functions. It was a neat tidy point but opened up a whole lot more questions that could be explored outside this study.

I also have updated the style sheet for my proof readers. What I was intrigued was to find there was a rule for whether you capitalise or not the Sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The answer is yes if you are talking of the generic form as there but not if you are talking of a specific event. So if I wanted to say I went to my goddaughter's baptism then the b is in lower case! You learn something new every day.

I have started redrafting the chapter on flows. Intriguingly this time I found I could only start structuring it once I had written the introduction. I do not normally write the introduction until the end. However I will need to go back to the introduction to finesse it and put in an idea of what is covered in this chapter. That means next weekend I am writing four mini articles (about 1,500 essays) on the relationship of four different aspects of fluid dynamics.

Oh and the doll, well she has gone through a fair bit of the thesis with me. Firstly timing interviews so they did not go too far over the hour, secondly timing writing time in a morning and now timing  Pomodoro slots which I concentrate for.

Week 39: An argument outline written

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	64,103
Words typed this week:	3017
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	0
Days I managed to write this week:	3

Right this week has been like getting blood out  of a stone. I started out thinking that I would write the theory part of my chapter on worship. The problem is finding people to work with. On the other topics I have found people who have allowed me to think with the subject area although I might have had to search hard to find them, certainly I did with location and it was not until I realised that social geographers was a different way of looking at it that I found anything. However sociology of worship/liturgy/ritual is even harder. Firstly there seem to be very few specialists. Most people are either historians or professional liturgist first and then happen to write something with a sociological or psychological twist. I asked my supervisor last supervision and he indicated that it was just him and Kieran Flanagan at Bristol who is strongly Roman Catholic. Now one of the things the ethnographer in me notes when working in the field of sociology of Religion is their is a strong cultural divide in the understanding of Religion from those within a Roman Catholic milieux and those whose background is more Protestant in the way faith is conceived. This does not seem to have anything to do with belief of the individual.  I think I have found one or two other voices but it is taking time and I am finding far more comment on whether it can be done than people actually trying to do it.

I eventually broke the log jam I was having in getting anything written this morning by using Pomodoro Technique. I have used this in the past and found it useful but tend to want to work more freely. Great when the words are flowing but not when they are difficult to find. I find that telling myself I have only to concentrate for fifteen minutes more (or however long to the end of the Pomodoro) is often enough to stop me from getting distracted. I really must use it more often not just when I am facing deadlines.

This week I have a supervision and need desperately to get on with that section on theory of worship done. I might however try this week to write something on the relationship of what I have seen in worship and how that relates to the Reformed Tradition.

Week 12: Start of edit of Methdology Arrgh!

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far: 24,122
Words typed this week: 2560
Words lost this week: 1861
Total increase: 741
Days I managed to write this week: 4

Guess what, I am jolly disappointed I did not manage to get rid of more words today. I need really need to loose around another 7,000 words from my Methodology chapter. I was supposed to be reducing it but my word count has actually gone up by 741 words. One's methodology should not be quarter of the total thesis. I am sorry but that is unbalanced. I know I am a methodologist at heart but really I could do better than have it as long as it is. I want ideally to get it down to about 15,000, that is about another 7,000 words to loose. Oh dear but  I have also come to the conclusion that it is a blob for each hundred words written whether or not they make the final thesis so you can see quite a bit of purple has gone on this week. Anyway click on the small Wordle below to see a bigger wordle of what is in my Methodology chapter. It would be nice to be able to tell it when to read words as separate and when to combine, for instance Ethnography really does not need separating off from ethnographer nor congregation from the plural congregations . However I feel it is a fair portrayal

The good news however is I have found books that talk about sociology of space. So I feel a bit dumb for not realising that I should have looked at social or cultural geographers! That said they are a lot easier to read than the French philosophical theorists and I am actually enjoying the one book I have been reading and suspect another will be as good. Treating space rather than as a set field but made up of the arrangement of objects. An interesting idea. Only thing is I could have done with having these read over Christmas but I was not aware of them then. Writing something four days a week really makes for a discipline in reading. More and more I am using Pomodoro to get bits and pieces done. Next week it is back to trying to write about location.