Week 26: Another week with good progress

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	46,248
Words typed this week:	3116
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	3116
Days I managed to write this week:	4

As you can see progress has been good this week with another 3,000 words added. I expect to find that I have another 2000 next week. The next topic is not so wordy as this one which is the real reason for the three thousand plus words this week not that I wrote them during the week. Indeed some I wrote the week before but then the week before I actually had two weeks of writing to deal with. Having put the location chapter to one side this week that leaves me clear to get on with the community chapter. I am sitting here and realising that there are things I will not talk about which if you had asked me at the start I would have said were part of the URC identity. Things like Peace and Justice and how the congregation relates to that. Now I am aware of those as topics within the life of both congregations but they were not ones that either were stressed over or doing work over. They are just an accepted part of congregational life. Indeed I suspect if you did not know what to look for you might not think there was even anything special on the go. Often the responsibility for keeping the topics on the agenda is left to one or two people.

The other thing is I am beginning to get my head around the reading. It is taking time to work out what. In some ways the easy thing has been to look for theories on group anxiety and it looks as if I can use the British Kleinian Psychotherapy rather than American Bowen Systems to do much the same thing. This is good news, as I know Klein psychotherapy quite well. Here is one of the real odd things about my thesis. One of the key writers for me if I take this line is Isabel Menzies Lyth. Now I thought nothing of a London Psychiatrist when I came across the name apart from the fact she was a woman. Then she died, and I found out not only is she a fellow child of the manse but she also is a St Andrew's graduate which is where I did my first degree. Now if I remember correctly from her obit in Alumnus (graduate magazine from St Andrew's ) I think she is largely overlooked. We can overlook the fact she worked for the Tavistock Clinic and URC headquarters are a Tavistock House (I suspect they are near neighbours). The world sometimes feels very small indeed.

Anyway having dealt with the relationship with children I need to move onto what is meant by a welcoming congregation. The problem with this is that it is actually a very hot topic in the URC at present with the collapse of ZI Campaign.  There really needs to be some sort of debate about what it means to be welcoming.

April's Supervision: Location chapter put to one side

Coffee van at the Entrance to the University of Birmingham

I am on New Street Station awaiting the 5:00 pm train back to Sheffield after this month’s supervision. This time it was short and sweet, two reasons, firstly that the draft of the location chapter was at the stage where it needed putting to one side in both mine and my supervisors opinion. This means I have a complete enough draft to not have to worry too much about it at present. There are more important tasks to be tackled and I need a break so I can see clearly what the faults are in the chapter.

The other reason was my supervisor is inundated at present with people finishing their doctorates. I am long term compared with the rest that have deadlines. Myra has to get her thesis in tomorrow, Christopher has passed subject to minor corrections and Derry has submitted and now awaiting viva date with trepidation as it means arranging flights from the US. If all these pass then Martin my supervisor will be down to two students, me and Mikie, I am due next year and Mikie the year after. A bit of a change from when I started and there were over a dozen of us. Even more startling when you think Mikie and I both have a tendency to do our work on time (most at the start were on long term extensions).

Link to Wordle for Location Chapter

Work wise I now have a data chapter on location ready for final edit, and need to get my next chapter on community collated for a first draft this coming month, that is quite a bit of work on it, not least because I need to get quite a bit of reading into it. It is getting interesting as I take further and further the argument, I suspect that it will develop into an interesting thesis by the time I am finished but I am only getting to know it as I write.

One comment by my supervisor I need reminding of, mine is a literary thesis, that is the writing style is in itself a contribution to the thesis. It is one of the elements of raising the bar some time back, but it is also part of my methodology. The other thing I must do is remember to tell people where I am! This means that if I am talking of St Andrews I need to say I am, if I am talking about a minister I need to indicate that. It feels repetitive and stilted to a writer but to the reader it is almost essential for orientation.

I have two more descriptive sections to write, one on aging congregations  and children and the other one on  being a welcoming community, The thing is that the congregations meant specifically different things by being welcoming or friendly. However in both they have methods of limiting the welcome but those methods are different. Then there is a section on theory and the problem is not that there is very little nor that it is not something I know little about, there are lots and I need to do a pretty strong limiting on what I put in. I think I am going to have to sometimes gloss over some of the input, such as the idea of congregations as communities of learning much as I am interested in those ideas.

So I have plenty of work to do before 18^th May (submission date for my next supervision which is 24^th May). Hopefully by then my supervisor will be less stressed by other people’s theses deadlines.

Week 25: Crossed 40,000 word mark

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	43,132
Words typed this week:	3267
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	3267
Days I managed to write this week:	4

Right as you can see I have managed to get over half way with my word count. I am also approaching the half way mark with my three data chapters, in that I have over one and a half written. There is also the fact that I have started a new arm of my triskele, you can see the yellow and green now appearing. So when I have this arm finished I will be close to having enough words written and I will be on the home straight. The scary thing is I am still on target, I seem to be getting there at a pace which I can handle.

This week has also seen me send off the second draft of my first data chapter to my supervisor ready for a supervision on Tuesday. I am hoping that this is at the stage where I can concentrate on my second chapter this coming month and get it sorted. I still have quite a bit of reading to do, but tackling it by writing descriptive bits first then putting in the theory seems to be working better. The problem with this chapter is the theory is a lot more diverse than for the previous one. There the theory was in areas I had little familiarity with, here there are some where I know an awful lot because I have basically spent the last twenty years reading around them. I must be careful because these are not the main areas even of this chapter and there are other areas which are less familiar which I also need to tackle.

Actually I have the two big bits in this chapter still to write, one is on the way the congregations negotiate who is in and who is out, particularly relating to aging congregations but also to the idea that they are a welcoming congregation, there is a lot of dealing with anxiety there and so forth. I think I am going to use some of the ideas from the Tavistock Centre where they look at the ways organisations despite their goals have to also work as a people centre and things like anxiety has to be dealt with so that congregations can function.

Week 24: Approaching an early half way mark

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	39,865
Words typed this week:	3050
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	3050
Days I managed to write this week:	3

I am back to writing properly this week after a large editing session and also getting to the next draft of my chapter on location. I am tantalising near the half way mark for word count just 135 words short. This is optimistic because I know I have to loose words still from my methodology chapter. However it would be nice to turn in a thesis around 70,000 words.  I am about a third of the way through writing my second data chapter on community, I have now introduced the congregations or at least described them. On the sort of data you would collect as a quantitative researcher they sound pretty similar but when you start looking at the way they actual behave they are quite different. I may have blown Ulverstane's cover, I really cannot think of any other congregation in the URC that has ABBA impersonators regularly perform at congregational parties. The problem is that it has to be something similar enough to give the idea to the way this colours the whole feel of the congregation.

The other thing you will note is that I have all but finished one arm of the Triskele, so I now have to decide what colour I am going to do the next arm. I have light blue, light green, dark green, yellow, black, white, orange or red. Oh well a week to think on it.

I only wrote for three days as I was at my parents on Monday and had a migraine on Tuesday, I caught back up one of those days by writing on Friday but I was not up to doing it on Saturday. This week also looks tricky as I need to be in work early three out of my four working days, so I will be writing mainly in the evenings. On Monday this will take determination at least as I have writers group as well!

Week 23: Working on appendices

Maximum number of words:	80,000
Words typed so far:	36,185
Words typed this week:	2047
Words lost this week:	0
Total increase:	0*
Days I managed to write this week:	4

* due to the fact that they all are going in the appendices.

I have been dealing with a couple of case studies for my appendices. I write case studies as I am working through my thesis so as to gain an over view of the stream of events. In my first data chapter I initially included the details of the case study. At my supervisors suggestion I have taken it out and reformatted it as a case study, with the background and timeline. I have done this as well for the case study for my second data chapter. The thing was that that was a lot more in depth than the first one and it has taken me a lot of time this weekend to actually assimilate the diverse sources that I had relevant information in for the case study. I have been using NVivo a lot to find specific notes or incidences. It is even finding things that I did not know I had. I am cross with myself for not writing some notes because I have had to remember what happened on some pretty big occasions. However the core is there and I am pretty sure I have represented people fairly.

It is done so next week I am back to writing the thesis proper, as well as sorting out the submission for my next supervision. It it funny as although I am being pretty systematic I am nearly always working on two chapters at a time. I think I am happier working on the write description, write analysis, write theory rather than working in the other direction. At present there feels a smoothness in the process this way that I did not feel when I was writing it the other way around. 

Week 22: Major editing work on the location chapter

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far:36,185
Words typed this week: 0
Words lost this week: 1814
Total increase: -1814
Days I managed to write this week: 3

Yes that is last weeks photo and I am nearly 2000 words further behind than I was last week but it feels like progress! The truth is I have probably lost twice that number if not more words and put back in a fresh two to three thousand. However as it was not a case of just delete huge amounts and then typing in fresh but restructuring the old and using the new stuff to give it structure, I don't know what I deleted so can't estimate what I added. The task was a big one and I would say I was 90% of the way there with this chapter.

The real reason I am feeling more hopeful is I am beginning to see the way the thesis will hang together, the metaphor I started out with is developing and making a lot of structural and theoretical sense when applied to the data. This is important the scale at which I am working is a little explored scale in sociology. There is plenty of stuff that looks at big societal issues and there is plenty of stuff that looks at how individuals do things but groups have relatively little attention except as subsets of bigger society at least as far as identity goes.  I probably need to do more work on the actual metaphor, so I have ordered a book on fluid dynamics and am going to return to one of the fractal books I tried earlier.

Yes I know I gave up applied maths at Christmas in my second year of my first degree although if I am honest I did bits and pieces of it right through to final year thanks to having applied mathematicians as close friends and finding the department kept dropping the pure and statistical courses I wanted to do so having to make last minute changes. I think I skipped Prof Priest on the Sun but ended up doing a course on solving partial differential equations. You would also be  right in thinking that I never expected to have to use maths to complete my doctorate. However the one thing I have learnt is the more you understand the thing you are using as a metaphor the better you are able to work with it.

The next week is not going to produce a startling amount of progress as I am working on an appendix. My supervisor suggested that when I wanted to write up something in detail (three times in the whole thesis) that actually I should take those out and create case studies in the appendix. The thing is these actually need very very detailed writing and I need to go through two interviews at least to make sure I have the details right.

Week 21: Only slight increase as redrafting starts

Maximum number of words: 80,000
Words typed so far:38,629
Words typed this week: 2088
Words lost this week: 1545
Total increase: 543
Days I managed to write this week: 4

Well the progress is still slow, but I feel a lot more positive about it than I did last week. My supervisor was able to put into words some of my vague wanderings and get me to relate them to my thesis. That was a major achievement. Now I need to re-write the location chapter to reflect this.

The stuff that is wrong with chapter on location is structural i.e. actual organisation of the writing so that I can link it effectively with the theory. My initial solution was to completely muddle up but that would mean ruining the theory part that was close on finished.  What my supervisor suggested was removing a large clunky bit of description and putting it into an appendix. That I have done. I will have another two appendices dealing with two other chain of events that could take over the thesis.

There are interesting things coming out. I am I would have thought fairly typical of many members and suspicious of how much lip service is given to church meeting so finding that when I actually look at people's behaviour it shows that people tend to "get it" even without lots of front and also tend to value it, even if they don't attend. This is even amongst people who might have reason for not getting it. Now I am not suggesting that church meeting were usually exciting well attended events. On the whole they weren't. However the evidence suggests despite being the same old poorly attended business meetings they do speak to people of a church that is governed by the whole people of God.

Next week I am going to try and write the next appendix so as to give myself chance over the weekend to work through the previous chapter and start seriously reorganising. Oh the other thing is I have found a reference to a text that I have sought for a long time. The only challenge now is to find a library that has a copy of the text. It was printed in 1851 according to the reference. As it is a transcript of a text given in 1620 you begin to see the problem. However it is one text that quite a few URC members are able to paraphrase. It is interesting to put it in context and try and understand what it is actually saying.