Posted by alexandra_k on July 1, 2013, at 5:41:32
I don't know if there is some reasoning behind it but the wonderful magical number seems to be twenty-five.
Can't face the thesis today? It is okay. You totally don't have to. Just look at it a little bit for twenty-five minutes and then you can go do something else.
And inevitably something pisses me off about the way things are so things get moved around a bit and tap-tap here and tap-tap over there.
After fifteen I'm staring at my watch filled with angst and despair. It truly is horrible... But only ten minutes to go...
Then fifteen minutes later I realize I've worked overtime and I'm actually having fun and it is kinda odd to pull myself out of it - No I really must stop and get up and stretch and have a break.
And then after 5 minutes... Or 10... Or an hour...
I only have to face it for twenty-five minutes.
The goal is: 6 blocks.
Every day.
Forever.
Where I've been going wrong...
My life is fairly ruled by my urges, I guess. I don't have any external structure. Just odd deadlines cropping up. Deadlines that (as an undergraduate) could be met by a combination of my natural curiosity (actually desiring to read the books / go to the lectures) and a couple days cramming. Then Honors was a bit of a push... 4 major essays... Around a week for each of them... A month of hell... Somehow I got through (fear of failing). And then Masters was basically the same thing again. One month of hell at the end of it all to pull together two major pieces of work into a single work.
But this...
Is different again...
It is the length. It is an awkward length.
I keep woffling on because I'm fearful that what I won't have enough words. But then I keep needing to delete out great chunks because it is an aimless ramble and there doesn't seem to be a point to it. I waste a lot of time trying to get the phrasing right, digging out references and so on for great tracts that only need to be deleted out later. I don't have much of a sense of what parts need to be expanded out and what parts need to be culled back. And nobody else has an opinion...
One of my advisors early on said that there are an infinite (or more cautiously indefinite) number of theses out there in something like a Platonic realm of forms. And that... I only had to hit upon one of them.
I think there is something to that. There are an indefinite number of ways things could go. I could craft what I've got in indefinitely many ways into indefinately many different theses. Which way I go doesn't actually matter. It is just about hitting upon one of the ways and doing it.
Another of my advisors a bit later on said that he liked to think of it as google earth. The biosphere is the title. The continents are parts. the countries are chapters. And so on... And you have different levels of zoom.
And the thing to do is to find an interesting angle and work with that... And when things get stuck then shift the level of zoom. That sometimes that helps.
And that is all very vague, really...
I guess the thing is... That it will be obvious to us all when it is done, and it is obvious to us all that it isn't done yet.
Hmm...
Currently I'm thinking: 3 papers. So around 20,000 words per paper. Or less. Lets say 15,000 words per paper. And then I can write an introduction and conclusion later that will tie them all in. I think theses almost endlessly repeat, actually, so that is good for a whole bunch of words.
Journal articles... Are more like 6,500 words. So morphing a 6,500 word article into a... Lets say 12,000 words paper (with lots of repetition for signposting) still requires about half of it to be needless woffle. So about half of it is a sort of a space filler...
Or perhaps I'm thinking about all this all wrong???
ffs.
Just Get It Done.
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1046156
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20130612/msgs/1046156.html