More refreshment

I was feeling a bit stumped this morning, so I went back and looked at my prospectus powerpoint. I have to say, that was a nice-looking presentation. You know when you choose the right colors and formatting and it just looks good?* Ahh.

It was refreshing to look back and really look at the whole big picture, to remember that I am actually interested in this, to remember that I have actually already done a lot of the work, and to realize that this is going to get done and actually not be too bad in the end.

I'm revising my hypotheses. Does that sound bad? Don't worry, I'm not actually changing any aspects of my research or fudging so it sounds like I was going for something different. I just don't like the way I organized my research questions. I feel like if I somehow reorder/rephrase them, they'll fit in with the big picture/theoretical implications better. Now I just have to figure out how to do that.


* In case you're curious, the pptx theme was "Advantage." It definitely ranks as one of my favorites. Not too busy, no lines boxing you in, enough color to be fun but still professional.

Chop chop

Today I switched my focus to chapter revising. It was so refreshing! I thought I preferred doing the objective tasks, but that had become so tedious that it was nice to step back and look at the big picture again.

I'm looking particularly at my pilot studies and hypotheses today. I had written all this up for my original prospectus, but of course am unhappy now with how that looks. I've realized that my second pilot study is only marginally related to my present research and the conclusions actually prompt me to look at entirely different things. So chop chop! and it's gone. Now I just have one pilot study that is clearly relevant and impacts my current methodology. Much nicer.

I should note that I am not usually able to delete large chunks of what I have previously written. It's a psychological hangup of sorts. I want to hang on to it, just in case, and do so by leaving it in and just putting a line through it or changing font color or some other method. However, after awhile that gets really cluttered and you're so distracted by thinking whether or not you should include that stuff that you can't move forward. So I have taken to just creating a new document every time I plan to do some major revision, making sure to include the date. That way, I can always go back and review what I've chopped. This really frees me from the fear of deleting something brilliant. And most of the time, it wasn't brilliant and I don't miss it at all.