Thursday, November 01, 2007

The Dark at the End of the Open Space

(Post begun last weekend)

After spending today (a Saturday) at the office, I can say that I'm finally feeling excited about the completion of my dissertation. It's been a huge, endless* plain of information upon which I've wandered for lo, these past coupla years, but now the narrow gully that is the end of my journey is in clear sight.

What we'd been doing is having TheLimey watch Limelet on weekends while I worked on my diss. This worked like a charm. That is to say, most of the time it didn't work at all, and when it did, it may well have been coincidence.

I was doing maybe only an hour or two's worth of work and taking eight hours to do it, because of the constant distraction and interruption. Limelet can't stand having me at home but inaccessible. TheLimey can maybe take him outside for a little while, but that's limited, and also often requires my help to get him ready to go or to get him settled and fed and so on when they return.

So we finally hit upon the obvious solution, which is that I should just take my laptop and materials and head in to my office. After all, it's just across campus. That has worked great! Just a few hours of work actually yields results. It turned out that the building is locked on Sundays, though, so I had to go to the Union then. Still worked well, though less comfortable than my own office with all the amenities 'n' stuff.

Now I've completed 8 of the 16 tables/charts/appendices that are necessary to finish my dissertation. I think that means I'm officially within spittin' distance. After that, I just need to fix some formatting in my references section (easy) and then fix the verb tenses throughout my results/discussion section.

So all you edit-y types, any volunteers to read those sections and help me with the verb tense part?!

*seemingly

2 comments:

argotnaut said...

You just need to make the verb tenses consistent, you mean? When do you need it to be done? I might be able to help.

liz said...

Yes, verb tense agreement in the results/discussion section. I'm still trying to figure out which verbs should even be present tense versus past tense.

It's mainly stuff like "Proportion of variance in percentage of prejudice and authoritarianism scores explained by the examined predictor variables ranged from 14.7% to 16.0%" (past tense) and "Regression results (Table x, Appendix J) indicate an overall model of three predictors..." (present tense). There's not a deadline as such. It's more that I told my committee that I'd be sending it out soon, and that was, like, two weeks ago.