Revision

I learned in grade school/high school that the way one wrote a paper was to: 1) make an outline; 2)write a first draft; 3)Revise/edit; and 4) write final draft.

Throughout college, I aspired to this, but never really made it to that ideal. Usually, it was more like:

1) Take notes on stuff you read.
2) Think about it alot.
3) Realize this paper is due in two weeks, start outline.
4) Continue making outlines for different sections during all spare moments in between classes, while eating, procrastinating from doing other assignments. Make sure to put all the outlines on different pieces of paper, so you can misplace some of them. Accumulate a pile of reference material and various pieces of handwritten ideas somewhere near the desk region of dorm room.

5) Realize paper is due in a week, write new outline electronically. Start panicking.

6) Write furiously, and edit individual sections as you go along. Sometimes, I did get a full draft written before revising, but not most of the time.

7) During revision, decide that you don't even like the direction that one argument is going, and end up printing 10x the number of pages in the final paper, because there were just that many versions.

Unless, of course it was finals week, and there was simply no time. I have written 10-15 page papers in only 1 or 2 days. Luckily, they were things I had read for & thought about quite a bit, but I shudder to think how rough they were writing-wise.

It is not much better now.

Grad school writing has been pretty awful for me, particularly because my final thesis projects have ended up being very different from the entire set I had envisioned when I was proposing my thesis topic. So while these projects were all part of that plan, the ones that were discarded along the way were ones that really addressed the main theme of my original topic. I am left with three studies that are difficult to synthesize into one larger body of work.

I think I have figured out how to argue what I'm arguing, although its not the flashiest idea ever, but writing about it has been difficult. I think the situation is made more difficult by the fact that I've written so many different variations on aspects of choline transporter, having to break up certain mental associations with what the evidence in the literature means & use some of the same sources as evidence for something else. I also keep re-discovering papers I've read in the past & having to sit and skim over them again.

My own worst tendency is that I go looking for some citation for a very specific statement I want to make (and one that I know is a valid statement/idea) and get lost in the papers that come up in a search. On the one hand, it keeps me reading broadly, but I feel like grad school has been a constant struggle between breadth and depth of knowledge. And, coming back to writing, I have really had a hard time restricting what I write to relevant facts, and not slipping into trivia mode.

So far, it seems that the thesis-writing is an entirely new thing, and my writing habits are very different than usual with this. I'm essentially almost finished with another manuscript for submission (that becomes a chapter of my thesis), I'm pulling together another one, and writing a biggish introduction. I have not started the monster discussion section yet. I'm still scared of it.

The introduction has changed a lot, and I've been editing segments as I go along. Right now I have the first 5 pages done through 2 drafts, another 5 page section going through its second edit now, a third section that needs some expansion but can probably be in good shape with one day's work, and probably another 5-8 pages to write to connect them all into a decent argument.

Of course there are figures to pull together too, but many of these are almost done (at least for the dissertation; for publication of my last study, I still need to collect a little more data next week, then spend some time analyzing, but that can be done at a lower priority than finishing the beast of a written document).

So, busy busy busy here on my end. Another 6 weeks.