Dear all,

I need your wisdom on planning my writing over 2010 (I am aiming at a submission at dot end of 9 terms, i.e. June 2011)

Upsides:

My fieldwork is done and transcribed (interviews with school children, about under an hour each). My pilot fieldwork has been done, transcribed and analysed (paper out of it submitted).

Another upside : I am a very fast writer and can usually produce moderately okay drafts very fast.

Downside:

I have precisely 11 months in which to produce a first draft (earlier better) and 4 in which to refine for submission.

Of this, while I draft the introductory few theoretical chapters over 3 months, keepin these 3 also for analysis (analysis starts January 2010) is it sensible to say that I can hope to do this?


Caveat: I will always have 3 days of work a week on verydemanding projects plus teaching. I will also be presenting/travelling at least once or twice a month and writing papers.

Anti-caveat: This is precisely what has happened in the first yr, but I see that the thesis has made great progress instead of getting affected.


So, question is: Do you think this is doable? Fieldwork transcripts are with me already. I am in my 14th month of the PhD. Want to complete in the next 15 months.

make a list of everything you have to do, divided into the chapters, set yourself up a spreadsheet in excel, put the months across the top, highlighting what you consider to be the milestone points, then insert the items down the side, you can then decide when you will do what, you could break it down to weeks if you want. filling in anything you know about to make it more accurate for your work. Use colour, to make it easy to read. When you get going, you need to make sure what you have done so far will fit into your overall plan. Firstly I would make sure your ref list is up to date (obviously) but also accurate for your discipline. Make sure you have all the full stops etc where they should be, and for anything you have already written, make sure you have all the refs in your list. If you are using a master document to house everything, make sure all your headings etc in any chapter your write are using the right headings format - that is pick a heading, say heading two and use this to define all your headings that you want to be the same, that way you can change the lot to any style you want and they will all change, its probably a good idea to do this anyway, it saves a lot of time, and you don't miss a heading. The best thing is that you can move stuff around if you need to do so, it is very flexible.  You need to be prepared for unexpected events, I guess you can do it, although with everything else you are doing I don't think it will be easy, it may also depend upon how much background reading you will need to do to jsutify your findings etc.

Thanks Joyce and you've inspired me to poke you with a rather mundane question, sorry!

On headings - you said something about 'style' - now when I use headings, I choose 1, 2 and 3 for every single thing as appropriate and then the ToC generates itself. But what you say seems to have a touch of higher profesionalism (!) in it and i have heard others mention this word 'uniform style' : would you mind telling me how to go about doing that?

(Of course we both know, there's more to writing a thesis than headings and styles, but would be v useful!)

Bug

not sure I deserve that!:$ all I do is choose the heading from the 'body, heading 1, heading2' bit, but I leave the style as the one designated. if you do this when you get to the final bit you can decide what you want to use for said heading - 1,2, etc., that is bold, italic etc, and it should change all the headings styles you have assigned to that . if I were you I would have a 'dummy run' at it, take part of a chapter and save it as something else, choose one of the headings from the drop down box for the headings in your piece, save it and do the same for another bit, giving it a different name. Then set up a master doc, add these two dummy documents and then see if the headings change if you alter the style of the heading in the drop down box so that means:
you choose heading 1 which is italic size 12 say
for each heading in your document tell word that heading 1 is what you want to use
set up the master document
change the style of heading 1 and check it changes all the headings
if it does, then the system will work on any number of additions.
you can actually change the headings before you start using it, if you know what you want to use, but this makes sure it will work if you change your mind -
(you do have to go through any chapters/material you have already produced, and make sure you use the 'heading ... ' for each heading, it won't change ones that you haven't told it about.)

i always try these things out first, same as when I'm getting it to do anything involving maths, I always try it out with numbers that I can work out before I use it with something more complicated. computers know if you just leave it to them you know :-)

Thanks so much!! Will give it a try as you say here :)