How do you get a busy professor to respond to your very urgent inquiry? (Not only I am fed up of chasing people, but also curious about how you handle the situation when somebody doesn't respond.)

Mine is paid every 4 weeks by the University. I think the University gets it from the HEFCE at once.

I also agree with Stu. But on the other hand, I can understand your concern. I recommend reading a few dissertations from past years to see how they used references. You should be able to have access to the selected ones at your Institution's Library. It is also important to refer to journals related to your subject; not only books. Good luck with your work.

I've attended to a week-long PhD training school a few months ago. Being 32, I felt I was the most ancient one, among the very young PhD students. Thanks to this thread, I feel much better now

I think, in a way, an editor could be seen like another tool to prepare the copy for publication; not different than the ones on your computer only more reliable. The work is still yours, the editor won't be writing it for you, you are only paying for his services to check/correct certain things that are not relevant to your research but more about how it is written. I've never thought of this before but I think it's a good idea. If I could afford, I would get an editor to have a look at my finished thesis.

"Death and the Penguin" by Andrey Kurkow. Easy to read but not cheezy or cheap, very interesting. If you like that, you can read the author's follow up book called "Penguin Lost".

I've just noticed this thread, I've asked you a question on the other thread without knowing the existence of this one. Congratulations again.

Great news, congratulations. (I suppose you can now answer yes to that "any doctors on board" question). How does it feel by the way? You must be very happy. Do you feel a bit distant and unable to relax because you think that you have to be doing some work? You deserved a nice summer holiday. Enjoy

PutHimDown (before it gets worse)

Why don't you make up a weird-sounding message pointing out what will happen to the people eating smelly crisps next to electrical equipment and list some strange symptoms; and hang it under that sign?

MrRoboto, it sounds great. And I know what you mean about being distracted by making the text look nice. Because my background is Art&Design, I always find myself correcting and laying out the page as I write. Which is silly in a way, time consuming and it drifts the mind away from the actual reason. I'll definetly try LyX/LaTex. Thanks for the advice.

Thank you for your replies. It seems to be compatible with Microsoft Word too, but is it my imagination? I've had a look at the help pages of LyX after you've mentioned it, but I couldn't find if it's compatible with Acrobat, can I produce PDF files from that program? Thank you again.

That's good to hear. Thank you for your reply.

Claudia, it's a strange reference but what you said reminded me my old job. I used to re-touch old photographs of people's loved ones (always dead people for some reason). For this, I used to meet the client to collect as many photographs as possible to produce a realistic image. One day a client met me with no photographs and started to describe how his father looked like before he died. When I realised that he thought I could produce an image with no pictures and told him this was not possible, he started to shout at me saying things like "what kind of an artist are you, I came all the way to get a photograph, you are a fraud blah blah..."

I don't want to give you wrong ingformation (because I am not in the same situation) but I thought I can still reply to your question. Even when you are fully funded, you need to register/enrol to your course every year anyway, so I assume the university would be interested to find out whether or not you can pay the current year's fee only. On the other hand, I suggest not to give up and apply for other funding. Contact the University to ask for departmental funding, contact other grant-giving bodies. Good luck with the AHRC funding by the way...