Wednesday 14 November 2012

Going to miss the deadline

Ah bugger tits.

I really wanted to have this first draft done for the weekend but this just is not going to happen now.

I tried to work last night but was so knackered and feeling rather stressed about it all so sloped off and had a hot chocolate and ate, erm, roses in front of stupid tele for an hour and then went to bed.  Bean was up a few times last night so am glad I had an early one.  I do feel refreshed and ready for a hard day of typing and editing which means it was well worth it (tho I did feel guilty).

I have to finish editing this chapter, which will actually almost certainly turn into two chapters.  I am hoping to get one of these two finished today.  Tomorrow I will edit and cut and paste and shape the other chapter.  Then all the editing will be done BUT it will be thursday, and I can't work Fridays...  and I don't think DB is going to be happy with me working all weekend again :(  I will work over the weekend but may have to snatch time when I can rather than take liberties like I have the last two weekends and spent a LOT of time up here on it!

Bean is back in childcare on Monday.  I hope over the weekend to get the intro shaped and written roughly, then Monday I can tidy it and hopefully on Tuesday I will do the conclusion...  Weds I will do refs and abstract and post.  So I am looking at sending it on wednesday 21 Nov, which is about right as i think I have about 5/6 hard days work on it left.

Which is amazing and brilliant considering the standard of draft I want to hand in - having only 5/6 days of work left is brill!  On a whole PhD!  BUT it also means I am missing my latest deadline of tomorrow which just makes me feel bad and I will only have a month to edit until xmas if it takes Sup a week to read it and send it back to me.

It is a risk.  I could send a shoddy draft a few days earlier and have more time on the other side to edit, or stick to working hard on it and sending the best possible draft I can, hoping that when it comes back to me there won't be weeks and weeks worth of re-writing to do!

I could work until NYE which would give me 5 weeks of editing time.  This is very reasonable but will be a pain!  Beggars can't be choosers tho eh?

I realised a big breakthrough last night regarding the writing and drew out a spider diagram of the key points in my lit review.  As my research is showing how other research/ideas are a bit shit/debunking them entirely/joining them, throughout the thesis I need to keep coming back to these points, showing how my research contributes to the knowledge and, really, what my thesis is in the wider scheme of things.

As far as I can see when writing a PhD there are three levels of analysis. 
  • The first level is when you say 'I did this research/read this and it shows this.' 
  • The second level brings in your theory, so you say 'I did this research and it shows this, which drawing on Foucault illustrates bla bla...'. 
  • And then there is the third level.  This is when you say 'I did this research and it shows this, which, drawing on Foucault illustrates bla bla...  This proves/debunks the findings/contentions of bla bla shown earlier in the thesis by...'
This third level is where true analysis is made, your theory is in there and your findings/contentions are grounded in contemporary knowledge and scholarship about your topic.  This stops your thesis being simply 'I did this which shows this'... leaving the reader going 'so what?'

Pretty obvious stuff but it has taken me a while to get to this stage of weaving in all the different threads and points!

x J

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