Have been a bit ill/down for the past while, perhaps exhaustion from getting my chapter away and my body telling me I needed a break. Back at it today though, with a goal of Chapter 4 drafted by 14th August and Chapter 5 done by the end of the month.

Really important I just get the words out and refine the sentences later. Thankfully I have a good chapter 'map' done so I know exactly the structure of it and what needs to be done.

Will check back in here and record word counts etc as and when they happen.

Good luck everyone!

Good luck litphd girl! :)

I've been feeling a bit under the weather too so I decided to work on a job application instead. I love the post, but it has been posted since March, and the post closes for submission in Aug. Is it just me, or is that a bit bizzare?

That's quite odd Hugh, but I have seen once recently that's open until December. I guess they are happy taking their time to find the right candidate!

At least you are applying for it now, Hugh - imagine how frustrating it would be if it was your dream job and you'd applied in March!

Zutterfly, have you tackled reducing the word count?

I've got to take about 10K and I was wondering if you have any tips?

But I have about 10k to cut too so we are in the same boat! Maybe if we can cut 2k from 5 chapters? That may be more manageable :)

Zutterfly, oh no, I hope you have a speedy recovery! I had very minor surgery and it's taken me few days to recover, you'll need much longer, make sure you get plenty of rest!

I like the idea of 2K from each chapter but some of them I've already bought down from 20K to 12K. I think I'm going to have to move some things into tables or move to appendices. But my appendices is already very long too!

How did you bring a 20k chapter down to 12k? You must be *ruthless*. I am very impressed.

I'm going to have to cut out lots of words too. My supervisor keeps telling me not to worry about it at the moment, just get the last 2 experiments written up and then look at the word/page count.

But, a fairly recent discovery that my department's official word count for PhDs *includes* everything (appendices, references, contents etc. etc. etc. ) has caused a bit of a panic. My usual approach to word counts is to "shove things in an appendix" but that's no good here as that still counts! Agh.

Oh, and we've decided to appoint a Psychologist as one of my external examiners (I'm interdisciplinary) which means I ought to use APA style. Well that means reporting stats like: F(1, 110) = 5.402, p = 0.023, np2 = 0.302. I have a *lot* of stats in my thesis, and all those spaces between numbers and equals signs increases the words count a tonnne. In one experiment chapter alone, there are 540 instances of " = ". And i have 5 experiments.

Sigh. I'm considering replacing all of those with versions without spaces for the final word count. Which is naughty, but the mechanism for counting words is stupid. As is the idea that the Appendices have to be included.

So yeh, if anyone has any sensible strategies for cutting words, then I'd love to hear them. One of my supervisors has helpfully replied that he thinks my sentences are too long. But, as the ideas I'm trying to convey are so complex he doesn't know how he'd rewrite them to be shorter. Useful.

Oh, I'm using APA style and had not come across that stats gem yet - how silly it looks with all those spaces too! Thank you for the heads up on that.

From a readability perspective I think the spaces help. The publication manual states that not using spaces in stats presentation is the same as not using spaces in words from a readability perspective, and I do agree. It's easier to read with the spaces than without (especially if, like in my work, you have things like M=-2.00, which is a lot easier to read as M = -2.00). But, it's not useful for word counts!

Hi again, which font style are you all using? We have the freedom to choose any and its taking up so much of my time to decide which one to use!