hello folks ! (btw i am so loving this constant update throughout the day, its the ONLY ONLY thing that is getting me through the massive amount of papers i have to read and get through the day! knowing i need to give an update regularly so thanks Armendaf!).

just came back from the garden. read those 3 papers, in 46 minutes. (yes i am sad and i time myself lol its the only thing that gets me motivated).

i am just going to take a little ickle break and then get back to reading. just going to watch a dvd for about 15mins.

How are things coming along Armendaf? *hands Armendaf a tall glass of ice cold lemonade*

======= Date Modified 29 Aug 2008 19:30:41 =======
Hey Mira! nice to hear from you :-) yes, totally agree with you, the constant updates is a brilliant idea :-) and is REALLY working!! a gold star to Armendaf! i'd give you one, if i could!

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In reply to your questions, its a pleasure to answer them :-)

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First of all, how awful for your supervisor to say that!! :-s that is so unfair and uncalled for! i mean honestly how does he think that is going to help with motivation! really dont understand that, positive enouragement gets the job done, critisism and comments such as that, do not ever help!

I would feel annoyed and upset too if i were you, i dont blame you for feeling how you feel, if i were you i would feel downtrodden.

oh thats tough having to do marking work ontop of your thesis.

the only thing i can advise is, for you to concentrate on a certain aspect of your thesis, whether its reading papers, or making notes. when you concentrate on something, you're far less to dwell on what is worrying you. my supervisors had the exact same attidude, constant negative comments thrown at me, it really blew my confidence, but after taking a little break, had to pick myself up, and just concentrate on one thing, and tell myself, i'll prove them wrong! not do it for THEM, but i will do it for ME. and realise, i do enjoy reading and studying about my phd thesis, and whether i fail or pass, as long as i gave it my best shot, i can look back and not feel guilty.

so my advice, do it for YOU!

i know for me, if i've clocked in a decent amount of productive time, or have accomplished a specific aim. i enjoy a nice reward, of watching a dvd, feeling "yah i did study today!"
now your question how i developed structure for my chapters.

my phd is science based.

so i had 4 major experiments. each experiment results would be explained by a chapter.

i have my introduction chapter 1: background information , for people to get the basic knowledge.
chapter 2: methods that i used

chapter 3-6 results chapters, within each chapter, i have a small introduction chapter, results section and discussion.

i first organised all my results, and made a zero draft. which basically means just getting everything down messily, not worrying about order, grammer, or whether its even correct. just get my mad scriblings down.
then the next stage would be to go through the zero draft, and highlight the important bits, and start to put it in subsections, and then just slowly keep building up from there.

check out this website. it talks about the 4 stages of writing. hope it helps.
https://webspace.utexas.edu/cherwitz/www/ie/b_flowers.html

not sure if i answered your question.

maybe if you tell me a little bit about your phd subject and chapters you're thinking of writing and what you want to say within each chapter.


but please do check out the website i just showed you, it really helped me! (thanks to Olivia for bringing this to our attention(up))

and Mira, please don't give up on the report, screw your supervisor and what he thinks!! (i am so going to get censored by the admin hehe).

seriously, do the report for you and for us! just so that you are keeping us company, we're all in the same boat, and we just gotta keep studying, no matter how much we get done, every little bit counts every day!

so organise what you want to do, put up the aims, and do it bit by bit, and tell us what you have achieved. we're rooting for you!!!

i know you can do this report!! (up) you just have to push through the psychological pain barrier, thats the only thing that's in your way. you're intellectually able to write the report, just those daemons in your head are stopping you, so gotta push them out.

======= Date Modified 02 Sep 2008 10:08:20 =======
Mira,

...How I've got over that (and this is where the advice comes in) is rationalising the fact that I'm doing this to learn how to do research and if nobody is going to tell me how to do it, then it's going to take a bit longer than expected, but I'll do it any way. An added difficulty, is that writing is part of the skills that we need to learn, but again, nobody tells you that, or how to develop those skills; and worst, supervisors won't give you feedback but on written work, so you are bound to be wrong one way or another, at least until you learn how to write (in academic terms, that is). So what I recommend you do is to write and submit on time. If its not finished, it doesn't matter, at least that will give you something to discuss and you can get advice on how to finish up your writing. In time, you'll get better at finishing pieces of writing even though you know they are not ready; but that is the whole point of the feedback to discuss how best to improve what you already have.

Now, I can also give you some advice if you want on how to structure your thesis, but that's going to have to wait. Right now I have to go back to the thesis if I want to go home before midnight. Perhaps you could start a thread on that and some more people could comment on their personal ways to go about writing.

Back soon,

great advice Armendaf!!
and i totally sympathesise and understand about the whole attidude some sups have, been there myself!

that is excellent advice though , about not finishing it but making sure you get it in on time. sometimes that can actually push you to actually finish it, because you dont want to hand in an incomplete report when you know you just need a few more hours to get it to a satisfactory level.

wow working until midnight, that's really good.

i've glued myself to the chair, and wont get up until 9.30pm. want to get through as many papers as i can in the next hour.

======= Date Modified 29 Aug 2008 20:24:12 =======
Mira it might help, if you tell us, what the report is about, (general stuff, you can even say X and Y if you like)...

how much you have done, and how much is left and what you need to do to finish it, and what is your absolute end deadline for this report?

So, I've partially organised the next section and started filling in gaps. I've got some thousand words already in it, but must of it is just copy-pasted from previous writing, so it doesn't make much sense. I need to do quite a bit of editing and some new writing, but at least the new bits are not that many and it is information I'm well acquainted with, so should be able to get through that soon enough.

Right now though, I'm wrecked and starving so I'm going home to get something to eat before doing anything else.

8-)

======= Date Modified 29 Aug 2008 21:25:26 =======
======= Date Modified 29 Aug 2008 21:14:26 =======
Good idea about getting refuelled Armendaf! hope you have a nice dinner and get some time to unwind before writing again.

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I have a question everyone. When you come across information in a review article, but they have cited a bunch of other articles, how do you cite the information? is it okay to just reference the review article?

or do i really have to say Smith 1999 , Bob 2000, John et al 2006 , as reviewed in Davis 2008. and then i just put Davis in my reference endnote, or would i have to put all the other ones, but i havent read those. and i know you're meant to read every single reference, and cite the original= but sometimes thats just not practical.

okay just looked through my handy book of tips and notes, that i've collected over the months.

and i found this bit of advice ages ago

"what should you do if you want to use information by writer X that you have found quoted or paraphrased in writer Y.

Find the original paper and read it. you cannot attribute the information to Honda, as that writer was not the person who did the research, and you cannot attribute it to Smith (unless you have read Smith's study). instead you write:

Previous research supports this argument, since it has been found that (Smith 1990, cited in Honda 1993).

now my question, would i then have to put include the Smith reference in my bibilography list?

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okay i found this on the net:

"
Secondary referencing, or citing authors whose original work you have not readA secondary reference is used in cases where you have not read the original source, only what another author has written about it. In Harvard you could say:
The work of Colin Smith (see Gibbs and Carroll 1978, p.28) is very interesting because…
Then, in the references at the end of your work, you would give the full details of Gibbs and Carroll but not Colin Smith because you have not read the article and your readers can find reference to it in Gibbs and Carroll. The rule of thumb is: cite the piece of work which you have actually read."

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/educationandtraining/guides/citingreferences/faqs/faq.html#faq31

and

"Citing of Secondary Sources
If you wish to make reference to articles which you have not read, you should indicate the sources form which you learned of them, e.g.,
Mathies reported in 1978 (cited in Sadava, 1968a) that bearded men are a hazard in cell biology laboratories.

okay i think i have answered my own question, lol

Hi everyone,

Sounds like you're both clocking up a very impressive amount of work today!! Very well done!!

Hi Mira, sorry you've had that negative feedback, I had the same thing last summer and it threw me for a while too. My supervisor told me she was concerned about my 'deadline slippage' and that she was worried I might not finish in time if I didn't find a better way of working. We sorted it our between us in the end, as the deadlines and plans of work were all hers, imposed on me and didn't take into account the way I work best and that's partly why I had trouble sticking to them. Now we decide plans of work between us, and it's been fine this year - it's still hellishly hard work, but more do-able and she's very pleased with me these days 8-).

I start new chapters by making a list of bullet points of the main things I want to discuss, with my primary sources as the main focus. Then I flesh it out with more detail, references from my reading, what major theoretical ideas etc. I do it on paper, not computer, and tend to carry it around with me and think about it on buses, they're quite good places for having ideas, I find! I'm arts and humanities.

I'm afraid I slowed down around 4pm and ground to a halt - only managed another 200 words, highlighted bits that need rewriting in proper sentences tomorrow, and expanded my list of bullet points to discuss. I think I must have done about 4-5 hours work but it feels like nothing. So weird when my brain just stops having useful thoughts and I can't squeeze one more sentence out onto that computer screen!

That's me for today- too tired to do anything now, so I'm best off getting an early night and starting again tomorrow I think.
See you tomorrow!

======= Date Modified 29 Aug 2008 21:54:13 =======
======= Date Modified 29 Aug 2008 21:53:44 =======
Thanks Rubyw:-)

4-5 hours is excellent! well done.

yep get a good nights rest, our minds tend to wind down in the evening, time to relax and unwind and start again bright and shiny tommorow.

"periodical relaxation - relaxation precedes perfect concentration and mental freedom"

i am like you, i like working on paper on my chapters, find it so much easier.
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okay my update from last time which was at 18.20 . read 2 more papers, in total of 1 hour.

i am getting bored now..

i have so many more papers to read and get through and then i come across even more within the papers i am reading, it's never ending.. :$

feeling tired now.

so far today i have done: 4 hours and 50minutes of "productive time" of reading.


okay taking a 15minute break ..

Hi

Just to say well done to everyone for working so hard today. You are all doing really brilliant. I feel i should be joining you but am out tomorrow and have friends coming round Sunday so it will be a case of getting bits done as and when i can this weekend when i have a spare gap. Because of this, i doubt i will be joining in on the mammoth weekend of work so i just wanted to say good luck, and you are all doing so well. Keep this up, but do have breaks as well! Hope everyone meets their aims for the weekend.

PS Pete, the problem i am having is that i write my post, send it then check the forum and it seems that not all the message is posted. I am using internet explorer (v 7) and am on a PC. Thanks for taking a look.

TG, you deserve to take the weekend off! you worked so hard, you got all your chapters done. so that's a good idea to just do bits and bobs if you find the time. i hope you have a good weekend :-)

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well folks, i am calling it a night. i have no more will to read anymore papers! there still loads more papers i need to find and read. but today, in total i have read through 13 papers.

i am giving myself one more day (sat) to read as much of the literture i can. and then write my discussion on sunday.
abit behind schedule. but writing this discussion from scrath, i need to do alot of careful planning and reading and make sure i have all the background information and understand it.

night night - see you all tommorow! i can't believe this week has gone by so fast!

Since I took a longer break than I should have while having my dinner (I also saw a film on the telly), I thought I'd make it up by going through a couple of papers before going to bed. Well, I did that, and now I have a slightly better idea of what I have to write on that section. I couldn't do any more tonight, so I'm going to bed.

Talk to you girls in the morrow.

Morning everyone, just checking in for today's session.

Armendaf- sounds like you've got a decent-sized chunk of writing to work with today, even if it is copied from other sections, it's a really good starting point, plus some papers... you should be pleased with yourself!

Lara -very impressive number of papers read, well done! I'm so glad you say you get bored too, I can only go on for so long too, even though I love my subject. Useful post about the citations too, thanks for that, and I also like your positive 'thought for the day' quotes that you do sometimes - always wise words (up)

Tractorgirl - hope you have a good leisurely weekend, you deserve it!

Today, I'd like to finish the rest of this chapter in draft form, even if it's not very elegantly written, just to get all my arguments down on paper in a workable structure. Then tomorrow I can edit it and put in more references from my notes, and do a bit more reading if there's time/if it's essential. Time isn't unlimited and I'm sending the chapter off tomorrow anyway, whatever form it's in, so I'd better prioritise bits of the content properly so the supervisor knows what I'm trying to do with it.

It's going to be a long weekend, so will pop back now and then when I need a break. So glad you're there too!!

See you later.

Hello everyone! especially Ruby and Armendaf! glad you guys are working this weekend, don't feel so alone!
it's a beautiful day, bright blue sky, i have a nice view from my study room :-)
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Armendaf - well done on getting through a couple of papers before bedtime, and good you had abit of down time in the evening, we all need to rest.
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Ruby, good luck with your sections, sounds like you've got a great plan! and happy i am not the only one that gets bored. and thanks for your message :-)
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well my aims for today are, finish off researching relevant articles/subjects for my discussion, read all the papers. i am only giving myself one more day, and then tommorow i am going to sit down and write a zero draft of the discussion. i wish i had more time, but like Ruby said, unfortunately we don't have unlimited time, so just gotta do the best in the time allowed.
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my aims reading loads of papers!

will come back periodically to update on my progress. i might just do about 15 minutes to get the ball rolling today, and then have lunch.

good luck everyone!!

Hey Mira, how are you feeling?

Tractorgirl, have a fab weekend!