AnonGerman and Stu - you should get together next year, problem solved!

No piece of research will ever be finished, there will ALWAYS be something else that you could do next! I was told at my research student induction (all those years ago, getting misty-eyed..) that "a thesis is never finished, merely abandoned at it's least damaging point". Wise words.

Nice cold glass of Pimms and lemonade, slap on the sun screen and enjoy it while it lasts!

haha, 'soul' should, of course, be 'sole' - a spell checker wouldn't have caught that one!!

You might be lucky enough to have supervisors who will alert you to typos (as I was, my supervisors were very thorough). However, not every academic is prepared to do this. My friend who submitted yesterday had chapters returned to her from one supervisor with the soul comment "needs more commas, get someone to proof read for you!"

This guy was 15 years older!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/3491394.stm

Supervisors may feel that they are too busy to address typos/grammar issues and should concentrate only on the science but you could ask a fellow student or post-doc to proof-read for you? It shouldn't really be necessary to pay someone to find typos and bad grammar, surely any reasonably well educated person (friend, parent) can do this? Spell checking does not find everything as we all 'no' but used carefully (i.e. check and double-check spelling before you add anything to the custom dictionary!!) it can find most typographical errors, repeated words etc. Don't even bother trying to use the grammar check in MS Word, it is simply not designed to cope with scientific writing.

http://www.bristol-inquiry.org.uk/

IIRC, packages such as EndNote have a category for citing personal communications. You usually list the person's affiliation (i.e. academic institution) and also the date of the communication.

As a personal communication? This was how I dealt with additional data that I requested from various academics for my PhD work. Their studies were published but the specific data I obtained wasn't in the manuscript.

Onwards and upwards EE, the best is yet to come. Good luck for the future.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel (another tiger book!!)

Congrats!!!!

Pea, all my favourite bands from my teenage years!! :-X

Well done MsCrow!!