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.

I'm blue, da ba dee da ba die

(Confession: I had to google that title, because I wasn't sure of the order of the das and dees and so on. Now that I've got it down, I am sure it will stay in my head for a minimum of six hours.)

This afternoon was surprisingly productive! I worked on Chapter 2, specifically my pilot studies. This is still rather easy going, as I'm just copy/pasting from the prospectus and then changing. But hey, that was the goal of the prospectus - to have as much written as possible so that the dissertation writing could be that much easier! So no need to feel bad that I wasn't slaving over writing this stuff from scratch!

I can be a bit indecisive sometimes, and when it comes to what I've written, often I'll want to change something but not be sure exactly how yet. But I don't want to just delete what's already there - that's the basis for what needs to be changed, and I don't want it to just disappear! So I change the font to blue. Anyone looking at these drafts on my computer would be shocked at how much text is in blue. Sometimes when I have too much blue, I'll start using both red and blue - red for more superficial changes and blue for big content changes. About the time I need to start adding a third color (which varies between green and purple and pink), I need to think about just starting over. After awhile, it gets a bit hard to read! (In fact, I was going to change all the font colors on here to demonstrate, but I was afraid I'd give both you and me ADD.) Anyway, that's the method that works for me. I know some people like to use the comments feature, and others will highlight. Let me tell you - the highlighting I save for the REALLY important changes.

Right now, the pages are just black and blue. Which is appropriate, as they're just a little beat up and bruised, but they should pull through okay.