The barrier is broken

[triskellian]

Since some time yesterday afternoon, I have been writing actual words for the body of my dissertation. Real, analytical words that are part of the main point of the essay.

This isn't to imply that I've just been twiddling my thumbs otherwise; the prep work and literature review and stuff that I've done is important, but this is the actual meat of the thing, and I've had a terrible mental barrier about starting to do it. Breaking the barrier is a great relief :-)

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Hurrah!

Are you going to post word counts to your LJ?

[triskellian]

No. The way I work, in-progress word counts are fairly meaningless - the group of documents that will eventually emerge from cocoons to become the finished dissertation are already within the required word count, and have been for a while, but there are a lot of other people's words in there, and a lot of words of mine that are in no kind of state for anyone else to read. I could do word counts for some sections, or count the words in finished bits, but that's not terribly informative for anyone ;-)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Oh - cool! I said to a (pooting) colleague of mine years ago that despite the popularity of top-down writing in pooter programming I'd never heard of anyone doing it with an essay. Now I have! :-)

[triskellian]

<reads relevant Wikipedia page>

Isn't it just starting with a planned structure and gradually filling bits in as you go? That's hardly a rare essay technique...

It's the way I prefer to do these things, but it's been much easier this time than for any previous essay, because I'm writing the dissertation in Scrivener, which allowed me to start with an empty document or folder for each section, and then gradually fill in the detail - I've got a whole complex file structure with documents nested within each other in all states of finishedness from completely empty to filled-entirely-with-actual-work, and I'm interacting with the file structure and the text all in the same place. I love Scrivener.

This enthusiasm is completely irrelevant to non-Mac-users, because it only comes in Apple flavour. Ner-ner ne ner-ner ;-)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Isn't it just starting with a planned structure and gradually filling bits in as you go?

Could be, but not the way most people do it. Typically a student working that way would write their essay plan and then jump straight from the topmost node to the bottom one and start writing actual text for one of their sections.

Your essay is the first I've ever heard of someone accumulating notes and plans gradually at all levels of the tree, only reaching the first leaf node (section of finished text) right near the end of the project.

[mrlloyd.livejournal.com]

What you describe is a bit extreme but not all that unusual. For instance almost nobody writes the introduction to an essay till they've finished it.

For my A-level exams I used to prepare standard chunks of material on each subject, generally one each for Geography, Religion, Individuals, Politics, Economy and Society (GRIPES). An essay plan could then be prepared by noting down which order they were going to be deployed in and working out what I actually wanted each bit to contribute to an argument.

For my degree exams and for tutorial essays where I was in a hurry I did similar stuff but in a less rigourous structure.

[thecesspit.livejournal.com]

I wrote the introduction and conclusion to my thesis (rewrite) first.

It was rewritten about 200 times in the course of the write up.

[triskellian]

Yeah, but that's at least partly because I'm a champion procrastinator ;-)

[thecesspit.livejournal.com]

Scrivener is the only app I've ever seen for Mac's that I am very very jealous off. It's so -right- on how I work on documents (which sound slike yer approach as well)...

[lathany.livejournal.com]

:-)

It sounds, from what you say in comments, like you're actually a long way through and it's just the final translation into finished essay-speak that's required. Assuming I read you right.

[triskellian]

More or less.... ;-)