Chapter 1 in draft form…
E-mailed a draft of my first dissertation chapter off to my advisors earlier today, and now I’m fighting off a low, gut-level fear that it’s no good, that I’ve wasted the past two weeks of writing. Of course, I know that’s not true, not one bit, but I feel it nonetheless.
Interestingly, this feeling is in the same family as the feeling of having written a bit of computer code, and then leaving it for others to use…I know it works for me when I use it and I know how I think it should be used, but I’m concerned that the other people using it will come across bugs that I didn’t anticipate. Of course, I know that in the end the user testing process results in a better product, but I still feel nervous whenever other people first start playing with it.
So I guess I could think of this as user testing, except the product in question is the argument in my dissertation…if Ron, Bruce or Trevor find anything wrong, then I’ll just start debugging.
[Yeah, can’t you just tell that I’m more confident coding than writing these days?]
September 16th, 2003 at 8:48 am
i don’t think it is anything to worry about, just keep writing. i’m in the same basic stage, if there are problems, they can be fixed, just maintain an open dialogue, and keep up the pace, cause once you have the complete draft as you want it, then they have the full picture, and the changes at that point are different than the incremental changes that pop up in the chapter review.
October 17th, 2008 at 4:34 am
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