I have been heaping ‘cut stuff’ from my ongoing MA thesis into this blog, some of it in public and some hovering in draft status because it’s way to messy to be really online, even in here. The ol’ thesis, thankfully, is going well. I’ve just finished going through it again from beginning to end, cutting out everything confusing or crappy (hence the heaps of cut stuff) and formatting what I’m left with into the accepted Concordia Thesis Style. (pdf)

This includes things like making quotes and footnotes in MLA style, or turabian style for the social sciences (pdf). Adding a 1.5 inch left-hand margin and 1 inch right-hand margin, chapter headings,
double spaced everything with single spaced quotes…etc

Mindmendingly irritating, but it does look more finished.

The process I’ve gone through to get this point with my thesis has served me well so far. I am a very systematic person in some ways, although it often surprises people who know me to find out how many layers of work I do while seeming (generally) silly and all over the place.

Here’s the story of my thesis process:

1 year of research. Reading, reading, reading, following other people’s footnotes to find the primary texts, and writing my notes and quotes into a searchable database (first in an old greymatter blog, and then in the ‘articles’ section of Open forums.)

During this time I also kept an open office document called “thesis” going where I’d rammer out ideas as they came to me, usually in the late evening or early morning. This got to be quite a large thing, with nearly fifty pages in it, and though it was messy and bombastic and largely unusable it gave me an invaluable sense of getting somewhere.

The key with thesis writing is not freaking out. When you freak out you stop working, and time goes by in big work-free chunks, and it gets to feel like it will be impossible to ever finish the stupid useless thing. You need to make your process padded and encouraging for it to be failproof, and a good way to do that is to write a lot on the computer during the research stage. Then, whenever you’re like “I have no idea what I think I’m talking about” you can sit and read through your pile of musings and do simple editing and fleshing out and, almost without noticing it, get yourself a little somewhere further.

Also, I was contantly writing different possible outlines and chapter breakdowns. Just thinking about how the argument would be shaped in that big general way kept me focussing on what it is I was actually trying to say.

1 month of proposal writing, and then a proposal defence.

This was probably the hardest part of the whole fandango. All I can say is, suck it up and do whatever you can to get this over with.

Ok, there’s a few other things I can say, I guess, but really I shake my head at the thought of this. There is something truly terrible about having to do a song and dance about what your phenomenal thesis is going to be about and how it will all go down when really you’re going to discover so much more about it as you write.

I have written proposals before and tried to keep them soft-spoken and demure, and have had teachers be like: “I think you need to think this through a little more.” So this time I decided I would rather do it balls out, as they say. To lay out all the things I was really excited about, and the connections I was looking forward to exploring, and the surprising ideas I had had about the relationship between my theories and methodology. I editted this several times before sending it to my advisor.

I have had to train myself to sleep on anything, and give myself time for another clear-eyed edit of anything I’m going to send to him (or anything important to anyone, really.) Before learning this lesson I have lain in bed writhing with the shame of all my verbose and unsupported claims sitting in his inbox. The problem is, writing, and finding yourself actually saying your astonishing (for you) new ideas, can be exciting, and this gets my fingers twitching towards the send!! button, and I really need to talk myself down.

Anyway, the balls-out-plus-much-editing process seemed to work well. My advisor had some great suggestions about paragraphs that should be switched and topics that should be addressed..

In fact, at this stage we ran into a classic University communication irritation: I had followed the requirements for proposal writing given out by the prof in my Methodologies class, and my advisor, upon reading it, disagreed with what had been emphasized. He cut some of her categories entirely. In fact, he had me cut the section I was least comfortable with: “where this projects fits in my research history.” Given that I had come into the program from Eng.Lit with a proposal about hiphop, and had proceeded to move from there to detective fiction before settleing excitedly on Innis and Open Source, I had had to do some fancy dancing to make that one work. Different prof’s always want different things, and you kind of need to just accept that and go with it, and make sure you are working with a prof whose whole vibe and process you really dig before subjecting yourself to their whims and methodologies.

Anyway, two dedicated sessions of editing later I had something Advisor’s No1 and 2 were prepared to see me defend. I arrived early and waited for a half an hour outside the room I’d been told to come to before one of my advisors came from the room they’d been waiting in to look for me. Again, classic. And with no advance warning whatsoever my number one advisor turned to me and said, “Ok Risa, why don’t you go ahead and speak about your proposal for the next, say , thirty minutes?” And I nearly fell down whitecoldcoughingdead.

I said “Un, well, sure, although I had no idea I was going to be asked to do so” and smiled blankly at my number two. He sutffed a smile and said “Well, given that we’ve both read it, I have been asking my other students to present for fifteen, if that would be acceptable for you?” No1 nodded, and I breathed again and jumped into it before he could change his mind.

I have no idea what I said, it’s all a blur. I started somewhere in the middle and jimjawed my way around from there. I’m pretty good at making complete sentences and using big words when put on the spot, and I must have pulled it off because they both let me through, but I can’t believe it made much ordered sense.

Somebody once told me that you would do well in grad.school if you were one of those people who could figure out what to say when you didn’t know the answer, and that’s proven to be very very true.

My advisors gave me some advice about not biting off more then I could chew; they said my phd thesis was probably also contained in the proposal I’d given them; and that I should keep my focus on Innis and put all my other theoretical tangents (and there were many) into my footnotes as ideas that I could come back to.

After this I took a week off from thesis writing to celebrate Christmas and recover, and waited for the end of the month.

On the first of the next month (and the new year) I began my uber thesis-writing regimen.

Every day for a month I was going to write 2 pages. I’d get up pretty early in the morning, and get my coffee and get a good chunk of work done before other people are up ready to bother me. (You know who you are. Elran;))

According to my rules, I had to go from the beginning to the end, building an argument in a natural, logical way- no skipping around. I was allowed to copy and paste stuff in from my notes (that’s what they were for after all) but only if I had reached a place where they actually belonged.

Once I had done two pages I could stop, even if I had copied them in, but if I got caught up and did more (which often happens) that did not mean I could count that against the next day. No matter how many pages I did one day, the next day was a clean slate that needed me to write two pages on it.

By the time I got to the fifteenth I had forty pages, and I took a two day break.

Then I got back into it and kept trundling my way forward. With five days left and a good seventy pages behind me the momentum got crazy. I ended up writing over 20 pages in those last days, and coming up very rarely for air.

And then, with only I month of my life gone by, and not too painfully at that, I had my first draft.

Next task- readers.
Now that I have had a chance to keep working on it, I feel a bit embarassed about what I gave people to read at that stage. It was a pretty chaotic lumpy thing and it must have been a nightmare to read, but the push it gave me to get cracking on it again was incredible. I gave it to three people and, after about 2 and a half months two of them gave it back.

I got very little advice from my advisor No.1, but it was, as usual, incredibly concise and accurate.

I got quite detailed notes from my friend Andrew, lots of questions, and criticisms, and generally the same positive notes and No.1 had had, so I knew where I was on the right track.

And ever since then I have been sitting down to it every day or every couple of days. Sometimes just reading a chapter and thinking about it, and then getting new books and fitting in what needed to be said. More often cutting chucks and untangling knots and moving slowly but steadily ahead.

As I said at the beginning (of this now remarkably long post) I have reached the end of this go-through of the thesis just today. Though I’d like to email it around to all and sundry, I know I need to read it all the way through one more time, and add a few things that are missing before I start blaring my horns.

But anyway, that’s been my process so far- I think processes are super interesting, almost like a little program we write for ourselves to follow, sometimes even without realizing it. I’d love to hear about yours!