Final edits

Final edits today and print to pdf in order to get thesis bound. Exciting!

Rob.

final straight, light at end of tunnel

Just a few bits of feedback to incorporate. PC reckons it is much better than previous version. MS may have lost interest as going off to Aus soon and lots of proffessory things to do. I have to give a talk on Friday, not the best timing.

A bit more data

I only focused crawled the midlands, not the other 4 vernacular regions. I have had to go back and put this right and it has taken time I can't really afford. I said to my supervisor that someone had told me a PhD was more a marathon than a sprint, but that I thought it was a sprint of marathon distance!

The thesis is much more structured now, which is important. I've done the work but presenting it properly is as much work again. I am stunned by how little human enterprise can achieve sometimes!

finishing straight

I am in the last few days of proof reading. This is not very motivating for me. I read a previous PhD yesterday, and noted what was good and what was not quite so good (it is a good one, so helps me get motivated to do as well as possible). I had no abstract or acknowledgements on mine (Doh!). It was good to remind myself how careful you have to be to explain all the links between things, I sometimes forget because I have been looking at this area for over 3 years now.

Anyway the thing stands at 280 pages, which should be enough for anyone. :)

Been a bit slow this week

Got a finished PhD all apart from the conclusion of the conclusion. Had Thursday off, as it suddenly hit me that I was nearly there, just read a book. Was going to finish completely bar the read-throughs on Friday, but woke up with a headache. I find that I have to be on form for proof-reading and conclusion writing, so had Friday off too. Did a little tinkering with region size estimating ideas, and seem to have something interesting; I suppose I might add it in if the changes are reasonable self-contained (which they seem to be). Did no work today, and will do none tomorrow, but Monday should see me full of enthusiasm after the rest.

over 80,00 words

it is worth saying I went over 80k words last week. still growing, but with a few rough note that need to be removed, this will be about the final size of it. Wow! that's a lot of words.

Rob.

nearly done

I am reading through the whole thesis. Realised that I could make a point about the results, with one more table, and it is quite a good point and helps draw things together.

Some of the build up chapters seem a bit disjointed in places. It is just that the link to something I have actually done is not made explicit every time, but to do so I feel would make the writing a bit clumsy. I guess it will never look perfect to me, 'cos I made it. A lot of it has already been sanity checked as part of the transfer report, so it can't be awful.

Will have it ready for the supervisors to look at soon, and will get a more objective view. Need to get it handed in.