This blog is a cut-up of a dissertation in progress. Each day, I will post my favorite sentence that I have newly scribed. Everything out of context, but suggestive. I hope.
I'm a game designer, a games researcher, and a future forecaster. I make games that give a damn. I study how games change lives. I spend a lot of my time figuring out how the games we play today shape our real-world future. And so I'm trying to make sure that a game developer wins a Nobel Prize by the year 2032. Learn more here in my bio or get my contact information on my contact page.
On track to write about 10 pages today. Not bad... but my brain is totally thrashing trying to figure out what to about a Chapter 2 that has suddenly exploded into a Chapter 2, 3, and 4. I keep wanting to be DONE with Chapter 2, but I've just come to accept that it's really 3 different chapters that I have to write simultaneously to make sense of any single one. So my brain hurts today.
How can researchers resolve this design dissonance?
posted by Jane | 5:22 PM
2 Comments:
At one point, my dissertation draft was 360 pages single spaced. The only way I was able to finish was to continually repeat this mantra:
Keep it simple
Keep it simple
Keep it simple
Of course, you can't actually keep it simple; if you could, they'd call it an article instead of a dissertation. But you should always be asking yourself whether a particular facet of your argument is really necessary to drive the story along, or if it can be relegated to a (brief) footnote (or article or conference paper).
Remember, you have your career ahead. Better to have a clean, direct argument for the diss and save the rest to help drive you through the tenure process.
omg. that is really long. lol.
that's really good advice though. streamline, streamline, streamline. I do try to tell myself that my committee doesn't know everything I know about the subject, so if I leave an example or argument out... well, they probably have no idea the example exists or that the argument would make a difference, so they won't miss it!
Let it go, let it go, let it go...
thanks for the perspective. If I hit 360 pages my committee will shoot me. :)
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