After all that time spent using the Mind Manager software I was very well prepared to finally begin writing my thrid chapter of my thesis this weekend, but now I’ve hit a problem: I’m actuallly doing a bit too well on the chapter at the moment!
I was planning on putting down about 400 words for each subtopic and stringing them all together, but I’ve only got the first three done and I’m nearly 3000 words… I’ve no idea how I’m going to fit it all in.
It’s funny. I always thought that the max limit of 70,000 words was going to be really hard to reach, but I’m finding that with the right kind of preparation it would probably be really easy to shoot way over that. I was going to write seven chapters of around 8,000 words each. Then it became six chapters of around 10,000 words each. Now I’m on five of around 12,000 each and I can’t cut down the numbers anymore!
I had about 24 subtopics to write about for this chapter. On the current state of things, I could easily write around half my thesis on this one chapter topic alone!
Oops…
Still, it’s nice to be stuck with too much to say rather than too little!
Maybe just writing it and then worrying about the word limit at the end would be wise. At least that way you don’t stifle your flow on one area, and then realise that you’ll come up short because of a lack of things to say in another. Risk writing too much and then having to cut it down at the end. It may take a little longer, but the quality should be better.
Of course, I’m speaking from the point of view of recent A level Physics coursework. The content and level could make my point totally invalid. I hope not though, I’m only just getting the hang of report writing, I’d hate to have to relearn it all another way.
If current estimates are anything to go by then I might overshoot my target wordcount for this chapter by around 15,000 words.
I did a word-count on it today; including the quotes that I haven’t used yet I’ve got 9,000 words. Only 4k of those are mine, so that 5k of quotes. Bear in mind that text amplifies massively when you’re discussing quotes and I could be shooting way to high.
It’s actually quite a nice situation to be in for once, but I do find it ironic that I’ve swung so far into the extreme.
My theory is that I’m going to go through it all writing as little as possible and probably end up with about 5-7k too much which I will then hopefully be able to cull and use in my conclusion. Two birds with one stone!
You do need to learn new approaches to writing when you’re trying to organise something of this size. I’ve been struggling for years to work out how to get my points structured correctly, and I think this software has finally made it possible for me to achieve what I wanted.
I once had a writing professor tell me that to write a 12 page first draft if 4 are due in the final copy. Afterwards you revise to make it concise and get rid of the crap that doesn’t belong. I think you’d be better off writing 150,000 words and then trying to cut that down and/or removing whole sections while you’re into writing. You might be able to use cut sections or subtopics later for something else. That is if you have the time.
Thinking about all the drafts I’ve written over the years, I’d be quite surprised if I hadn’t already written something like that amount of words!
This chapter is the first time that I’ve had such an over-shoot happening on one subject, so it’s going to be very interesting to see how it proceeds. I am planning to trim it down considerably once I’m done, but that just extends the editting process and I’m hoping to get the thesis finished in December.
the numbers….THE NUMBERS….*runs around holding head and bashes into a wall to fall to the ground unconcious*…….
……………..way to much work for me… but yay! go mata…:)