The Best Sentence of the Day

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.

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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.

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Best Sentence #33

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?

2 Comments:

Blogger Ballard said...

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.

7:38 AM  
Blogger Jane said...

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. :)

9:08 AM  

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