It’s getting to that time of year
when PhD students are frantically trying to prepare themselves for their
various annual reviews. I am one of
these students who is frantically trying to quantify everything that has been
written/planned/thought about over the past academic year. As such, I’ve been looking for ways of organising
my thesis work (extra-PhD work is an entirely different kettle of fish and will
be dealt with at a later date) which will show clear areas of progress from
last year and outline where I hope to go over the next few months.
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| Searching for perspective... |
I thought I’d kept my thesis work
in pretty good order. A few months ago,
my supervisor and I did a terrifying but ultimately very helpful ‘halfway’
review, and I have meticulous files, sub-files, and sub-sub files throughout my
hard drive to break down the different areas of my research. PDF’s are kept
separate from notes which are separated from drafts and all organised according
to theme/topic and the state of the writing. The trouble is, once I start
writing longer pieces and chapter sections, the divisions of this careful
filing system tend to break down.
So, I threw environmental concerns
to the wind, and printed off every draft, set of notes, chapter, and page of
random musings, organised them thematically, and noted the kind of work
required in each area of each document. A time-consuming task, but a valuable
one nonetheless. Already, I felt a bit
calmer. I had actually done some useful
bits and bobs on various sections of my thesis over the year and grouping my
bits of writing this way helped me to see how my ideas were developing beyond the
individual documents.
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| ALL OF THE NOTES |
I decided to go one step further and employ
some of the advice I was given at a recent grant-writing workshop: break your
project down into its simplest component parts. This was achieved with a cheeky
glance back at my initial PhD proposal (which I hadn’t actually looked at in… a
rather long time) alongside notes from my supervision meetings over the past 18
months. I could identify where I had moved away from my original plan, how and
why this had happened, and where I could see my writing going in the near
future. I decided to break down my entire thesis, including both current and
future chapters, into key points/areas which could be broken down further on
individual flashcards. Now, I’m a big fan of stationery, so any chance to use
flashcards and/or fancy pens is a happy occasion.
On each card, I listed a topic’s
core components, detailing the different stages needed to explore my ideas,
whether the groundwork had already been prepared in my current writing, and
outlining how the ideas could feed into and support one another. I particularly
like using flashcards for this sort of organisational exercise because you can
move topics and sections around easily (I spent a long time doing this on my
living room floor) to establish how your arguments and ideas may best flow into
one another. Already, this exercise has
told me that my writing in the near future will take a bit of a different form
than I had anticipated just a month ago.
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| Loving life with my flashcards (and newfound perspective 👌) |
This little exercise may have
taken the best part of an evening (and cost a few trees in the process), but I
found it to be a straightforward way of gaining perspective on the state of my
thesis and the direction my writing needs to take as I progress into my third (eek!)
year. I was able to identify some key
thematic links in disparate parts of my writing (HOW did I not twig that poetic
and political bodies have something very significant in common…) as such, have
come up with a more solid working structure and framework for the next stage of
my research. PLUS, once I was finished
making and organising my flashcards, I got to use one of my fancy ‘E’
paperclips to hold them all together. Simply delightful.
E Over & Out
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