Home straight
I’m in the final stages of my honours dissertation. Preliminary feedback from my supervisor indicates that I’m not overlooking anything important, and that “there are no major structural flaws.” That’s a good thing.
Apart from the usual cosmetic changes that need to be made in the drafting process, I’ve got to shrink it. It’s at about 26 000 words right now, and needs to lose over a fifth. That shouldn’t be too much trouble, though — there’s a couple of sections that need to be considerably reduced, which will improve the overall flow of the paper.
Tomorrow I’m meeting my supervisor to discuss some specific changes, and I hope to have a draft in the vicinity of the target length by tomorrow night. (Mind you, tomorrow night’s State Executive meeting is preselecting a good many candidates, so that might be pushed back to Tuesday morning.) Then it’s fiddling with phrases and footnotes for the rest of the week.
Take out the adjectives. Remove indirect sentences. Write like the internet. Fail.
No, no… i am sure you know what you doing as a writer cos you do write internet well..
It is interesting, in the subbing I do for non-academic people, how much is gained by getting them to find the right verb and then asking if the adjective is necessary.
“He walked angrily forwards..”
“He lunged at” the evil replicant foisted on the innocent Australian public as a prime minister..
I wouldn’t take out “evil.’ Good luck.
Thankfully I didn’t have to resort to adjective extraction. There was a large section that I summarised in a paragraph, which gave me a couple of thousand, and I shortened some of the block quotations.
I’ve finished up at about 22000, including two new sections. Not bad.
All I’ve got left is to tidy up the formatting (heading, footnotes, table of contents, bibliography, etc), and add a smattering of editorial cartoons and photos.
Well, good luck. I’ve just finished mine, so I know what a relief it is to finally be able to hand the fucker in and go, ‘There! It’s finished! Now I can think about something else!’
Try to imagine what it was like when you had only Post Office nibs and carbon paper, and old timers told us, “You have no idea what it used to be like when you couldn’t afford carbon paper.”