Today -- o frabjous day, callooh callay -- I finished a draft of the last chapter of my dissertation.
In my field a dissertation is usually four chapters. In the first, you explain why this is an interesting question and what other people have said about it. In the second, you spell out what you're going to do. I wrote the first two chapters in the fall of '08 in preparation for my prelim, and then rewrote chapter 2 last summer and fall to reflect what I actually did. Chapter 3 describes your results -- that's the 40-page monster I sent off earlier this week. Chapter 4 is discussion -- what it all means, how it fits into existing research, what questions you've raised for other researchers to consider.
I've been working on chapter 4 in small bites for a while. After all the coding and analyzing it's been really fun to be opinionated. Sometimes I would just open the document and throw in a quick note to myself: this measure of vocabulary diversity = BAD. Later I would go back and put it into researcher-ese.
My mother-in-law came down yesterday and stayed overnight, and I've been writing up a storm while she watches the kids -- fixing the earlier bits and tying them together, and writing writing writing all the pieces that still needed to be written. I just finished. The last word is "hope." :-)
Way back when I was in the second semester of this program, Arwen left me a comment about asking for the intercession of St. Thomas Aquinas and Our Lady Seat of Wisdom. I thought, "Hey, what a great pair of intercessors." I have asked for their prayers every day since then. It seems perfectly right for me to finish this draft on the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas.
I need to review this draft before I send it off to my advisor, and I will have plenty of revisions to do in the next 3.5 weeks before the document is ready to go to my committee. But you know, once it's written down, you've got something to work with.
I am going to hug my kids, and see if they're willing to go to Mass with me this evening. I am so relieved. Tired, too, but mostly relieved.
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