Hi everyone,

I only finished one of my chapters :-( The other one is nearly there tho.

Good luck glowworm! Hope those cold medicines do the trick. It must be so great to be nearly there. I have to submit a complete draft in June and I am expecting that it will be very rough around the edges.

Or some universities have some kind of statistics support service to help students with questions like this.

I sent it. Let me know if there's any problem.

Hi GrumpyMule. I found it. PM me your email address and I'll send it you.

Hi everyone,

Tulip and Mathsgirl - I hope you had productive weekends and reached your goals.

I was writing on Saturday and Sunday but took yesterday off for some fresh air and exercise. I'm not quite where I'd hoped to be - I realised one of my sections needed rewriting, which slowed me down a bit - but I have the whole day today, so hopefully I will be ready to send two chapters to my supervisor by this evening. Perhaps Glowworm's PhD pixies will work some magic :-)

Good luck everyone!

Congratulations Dr Emaa! You're an inspiration to those of us who are dreading the viva!

Hi everyone,

Glowworm - well done on finishing that section yesterday. Tulip - I hope you're feeling better and managed to make some progress.

I woke up at 6am this morning in a complete panic, feeling as if I will never get my thesis to an acceptable standard. It feels a bit chaotic - threads going off in several slightly different directions and I'm struggling to bring them all together into a coherent argument. Anyway, I guess I just have to keep plugging away at it. I'm at work today, but then I will be writing most of the weekend. I need to add one more substantial section to one of my data chapters and then polish those chapters ready to send to my supervisor next week.

Good luck with your work today everyone!

Good luck Emaa!!

I think I would put 'It is better for them [young babies] to be able to survive'

Hi glowworm. I finished a draft of my abstract yesterday and sent it to my supervisor. Also managed a bit of work on my methodology chapter. Good luck with your discussion and conclusion chapter. I wish I had one of those!

Silverlining, I know what you mean about feeling inadequate. I get very disheartened by how slowly my writing is progressing, but in my case I figure it's better to be accountable so at least I have a specific goal to work towards even if I don't always make it.

I'm marking student assignments today but good luck to everyone who is working on their thesis!

Thank you GrumpyMule! Have a productive day everyone!

Hi everyone,

Can I join this thread please? I have to submit a full draft of my thesis by the end of June. I'm a part-time student so I can't work on it every day, but today my goal is to write a draft of my abstract.

Hi,

I think it's pretty unlikely that a lecturer would refuse to write a reference for you based on your fee status. If one of your referees is somewhere near the top of the food chain and has responsibility for budgets, that person might be a bit p'd off with you if your change in status caused a budget shortfall but even that doesn't seem very likely and is no reason for them not to write a reference. As TreeofLife says, you'll just have to ask again.

Try doing some free writing - just spend around ten minutes writing whatever comes into your mind about your topic without worrying about style, punctuation or grammar. That way you have something on the page which you can start improving.

Maybe they are both right some of the time! In some cases you have to use 'the', in others there is a slight change in meaning if you put it in, and occasionally it doesn't really matter whether it's there or not.