Since some time yesterday afternoon, I have been writing actual words for the body of my dissertation. Real, analytical words that are part of the main point of the essay
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No. The way I work, in-progress word counts are fairly meaningless - the group of documents that will eventually emerge from cocoons to become the finished dissertation are already within the required word count, and have been for a while, but there are a lot of other people's words in there, and a lot of words of mine that are in no kind of state for anyone else to read. I could do word counts for some sections, or count the words in finished bits, but that's not terribly informative for anyone ;-)
Oh - cool! I said to a (pooting) colleague of mine years ago that despite the popularity of top-down writing in pooter programming I'd never heard of anyone doing it with an essay. Now I have! :-)
Isn't it just starting with a planned structure and gradually filling bits in as you go? That's hardly a rare essay technique...
It's the way I prefer to do these things, but it's been much easier this time than for any previous essay, because I'm writing the dissertation in Scrivener, which allowed me to start with an empty document or folder for each section, and then gradually fill in the detail - I've got a whole complex file structure with documents nested within each other in all states of finishedness from completely empty to filled-entirely-with-actual-work, and I'm interacting with the file structure and the text all in the same place. I love Scrivener.
This enthusiasm is completely irrelevant to non-Mac-users, because it only comes in Apple flavour. Ner-ner ne ner-ner ;-)
It sounds, from what you say in comments, like you're actually a long way through and it's just the final translation into finished essay-speak that's required. Assuming I read you right.
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Are you going to post word counts to your LJ?
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Isn't it just starting with a planned structure and gradually filling bits in as you go? That's hardly a rare essay technique...
It's the way I prefer to do these things, but it's been much easier this time than for any previous essay, because I'm writing the dissertation in Scrivener, which allowed me to start with an empty document or folder for each section, and then gradually fill in the detail - I've got a whole complex file structure with documents nested within each other in all states of finishedness from completely empty to filled-entirely-with-actual-work, and I'm interacting with the file structure and the text all in the same place. I love Scrivener.
This enthusiasm is completely irrelevant to non-Mac-users, because it only comes in Apple flavour. Ner-ner ne ner-ner ;-)
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It sounds, from what you say in comments, like you're actually a long way through and it's just the final translation into finished essay-speak that's required. Assuming I read you right.
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