At 2am on the 31st, we have reached the end of “the summer” and I have loosely defined it academically for many years now (school starts early in September, but never in August in my experience — I moved in at my Oxford college on September 23rd) and I feel better than OK about how the summer devoted to advancing the dissertation went. I had adopted for myself the rough metric that I wanted to have a draft of every chapter ready for Professor Vipond by the end of August. As it stands, he has the first four chapters, I have hand-edited the fifth and am preparing to review the relevant interview reports, and then I need to do the same for chapter 6 and finally do a language edit of the conclusion. The existing draft is already solid. Nobody would know to miss some of the specific empirical details I am pulling back in from the interviews in these drafts, and Professor Vipond already thinks the review of the literature is more than adequate in scope and depth. What I’m mostly doing in this round of edits is spotting everything which would singe the eye of a highly experienced reviewer, as it saves a lot of time across the whole project to anticipate and avoid a correction rather than be informed of the need for one and comply.
