So after months and months of plodding along with my PhD work around my RA work and other stuff, my sup has given me 1/ a month off from my RA work and 2/ a PhD deadline

I have 1 month to write a thesis, starting today.

Wish me luck!

good luck sneaks!! Just keep drawing up plans for the month and then for each week and then each day, and cross things off, it will make you feel so much better doing that. It's the last crappy slog, you can get there!! Today I'm trying to get my corrections finished, must get them all done by the end of the week and it's looking tight.

Ooh, fantastic about the time off the RA work! Good luck with it!

All the very best with it Sneaks - it'll be tough going but it'll be over that bit sooner.

on your marks, get set, GO! Sounds a tight deadline but you have loads written already so I'm sure you'll be fine and do brilliantly (up)

Re: your hubs viva - I asked two people about maths-type vivas but didn't get any astounding insights I'm afraid. Really it's a case of the basic viva rules apply. 20-30 minute presentations are pretty normal apparently.

Wow, your sup is a task master lol. Loads you with RA work and then, no, a month to write your thesis! At least you have been given a month to concentrate on writing, so make a plan and get going with it. Good luck, you can do it (up)

Thanks all!

My progress so far

Chapter 1: Intro - needs to be a 2000 word 'statement of the problem' - I wrote about 1500 words 2 years ago which is now out of date :-s

Chapter 2: Lit REview - I wrote 3000 words last week, but haven't really done the main lit review. I have about 45000 words that I need to cut down to 8-10,000 and make it a good argument etc - this is what I'm doing this week and is horrible horrible task!

Chapter 3: methods - written already (I need to make a few tweaks to it, Walminski kindly provided great comments) so that's nearly done.

Chapter 4: I have a draft of chapter 4 pretty much there although needs a lot of editing.

Chapter 5: Written chapter 5 already for publication and that's been with reviewers in a 4* journal :-) for 7 weeks now, so waiting on their comments

Chapter 6: done intro, method, results but need to re-write these and make it decent! will take at least a week I think.

Chapter 7: Discussion - sup says we'll work on this after my 1 month deadline as it will bring it all together

bleugh! so lit review all this week - its horrible :-(

Good luck Sneaks, you can do it!

OMG I'm going to gain so much weight doing this. I think its the clock change too but I've been starving ALL morning, eaten 2 weetabix, a packet of hula hoops and a drifter!!! and I'm STILL hungry :-(

Good luck Sneaks. Sounds as though you've done a lot of the groundwork already though, in terms of existing drafts. So while redrafting is hard (for example cutting down your lit review to an acceptable length) it's better than starting from scratch. So you should get there ;-)

thanks bilbo, the biggest problem is changing 45k words which is basically lots of 7k chunks on different topics, into a coherent, well argued 10k chapter. I think its much harder than writing originally :-(

I'm aiming to get the intro and one section done today

Sneaks - for that bit, trying to cut down loads of text and only get the most important stuff - I would do it by talking out loud to myself as if I was explaining the topic and the context of the thing to my parents. I would have to cut it down to the very bare bones of what is important, talk about it in a coherent way and then just write down the bullet points of that. Then I'd just build up around that from what I had already written, a few thousand words on each point, and then look over it again to see if there was anything missing. Then I'd speak out loud to myself as if I was explaining it to a member of the department so I'm using scientific language and going into more detail than before, and then I'd tweak it to make sure it all makes sense and flows properly and I'm not leaving out any key papers.

It's much more enjoyable than just constantly re-reading the text trying to cut down words here and there, plus it makes sure you really see where the argument is going and what the common thread between all sections is (or helps you see why you might not have/need a common thread...).

Good luck Sneaks, you are almost there, I think congrats are due :)

ah, no congrats yet!

Today I've written about 500 words so far :-( I want to get my lit review done by the end of the week in order to stay on track.

You can do it, Sneaks! You're on the last leg of the marathon.