thanks shani. i'll be seeing my supervisor in the next two hours.

my perfectionist supervisor has decided that i need to do a major rewrite of my theoretical chapter. therefore i have to start from scratch again. am not very happy . she is a perfectionist and would rather my first draft was the perfect final draft - so we keep going back and forth.

I was once told to expect to do about 8 drafts of a paper to get a final product. This was doing papers on my LL.M. course so I don't know if it is at all applicable to PhD work...but my own experience so far seems to bear out that it is...I have done drafts of nearly all my chapters, but they have been revised at least once with plans to continue to revise and synthesise them as I go. My early drafts are often what my supervisor calls "PhD student thinking out loud" and then move from there to more polished ( hopefully!) work. So doing revision on drafts should not be discouraging...its just part of the process!

agreed - I think I've had to do about 6 or so drafts of each chapter - I never take it personally and just accept that they are probably right - If my supervisor can help point out the flaws, hopefully there will be less corrections in the end

And to be honest looking back at some of the early drafts I cringe a little inside that I even handed them in - but then thats all part of it too

Good--I am not the only one doing many multiple drafts!!! =) Like you said SJO I do also cringe when I look at the early work...EEEK!!!! but as you said, that is all part of the progresion. I see it as a definite GOOD thing to be able to look at my work and see that it has moved on ( and hopefully up!). I am soon to gut my entire literature review chapter- that was done in early days and revised in early days--and is almost irrelevant now to the work I am doing, so much more and a different focus! But you have to start somewhere!

jojo - onwards and upwards!!!

thanks everyone for your encouragement. i've picked up my pieces and decided to have a positive attitude. today i managed to draw a time plan and break the task into bits. i have started reading on it and it's not as bad as it sounded though not easy either. i worked from 10am to 2.30pm. i'll be doing some more work in the evening. i guess, if i keep at it, one day i'll wake up and it will all be over.

i worked from 2pm to 8pm today. til tomorrow.

Jojo, i can go through about 8 drafts before i'm reasonably happy (yet corrections still come back). I'm tempted to weight the chapter before then after and work out how much carbon, or dredded red ink, had been put onto the draft.

seems like you are gettin on well now

chin up, PMA and keep going.

thanks Grantino. it's great to know am not the only one redoing chapters. today i worked from 11am to 5pm. still trying to get my head round some maths.

thanks Grantino. it's great to know am not the only one redoing chapters. today i worked from 11am to 5pm. still trying to get my head round some maths.

hey

just had a meeting with my boss today. she's had a draft of one of my chaters for a few weeks and handed half back with a few modifications to be made. Well a few being a "scientific few" i.e. a lot of re-organisation due to the nature of the 35 page chapter. lol

Aw well, back to the hell that is MS Word!

maths? someone say maths?

(is intrigued)

hope your work is going well Grantino. i have been dong some reading and learning some of the maths i mentioned. so far so good. i plan to reopen my word documents next week after i have finished a lit review. doing it before then will be a bit discouraging. not sure i filled in my diary on Thursday and Friday. lets see..

was off on Friday and the weekend. i just received good news earlier today. my first paper got accepted for publication in a peer reviewed journal but with corrections to do. its based on one of my rejected chapters so i hope that is a sign of better things to come. looks like i have to get on to word sooner than i thought.