The long-distance writer

To my shame, I’ve not read it, but my friend and colleague Steve Emery has published a paper on the challenges of the “long-distance post-graduate student” Emery (2007) see here. My guess is that he found similar things to me… besides the challenges of trying to get what you need from an unfamiliar library with a limited borrowing allowance (thank goodness for electronic journals, that’s all I can say), the biggest issues for me are simply keeping in touch with an understanding of the level of writing that the PhD expects and getting responses from people fast enough.

About a month before Easter I was well on the way to getting the first drafts for everything in… I’d written all the first drafts of the data chapters, had them checked, and I was about to go onto the theory… the idea was to get that in by easter, have a few days off, and then get on with the editing…

Then one supervisor went on study leave, and the other came back from study leave, requesting that I get all the editing done before they looked at the chapters.

Not a problem… after all, it’s all got to be done at some point… the only thing is that out of contact with others doing the same thing, and out of touch with the most recent trends in your field (it’s just inevitable if you’re 150 miles from the office and you can’t go in more than once a month!) every time you send a revised chapter, there’s that horrible moment of waiting for an acknowledgement, and then the comments, and then the realisation of what more needs to be done…and the feeling that you’re slowly drifting away from the target, whilst the deadline looms ever closer.

And all the time there is a feeling that my writing is not as good as the stuff that I’m reading… and no reassurance that that’s OK because I’m still only a PhD student…

So now it’s past Easter, and all the revised data chapters are in… but I’m no closer to knowing if they’re gooed enough… and the theory still has to be written…