---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:14:48 -0400 (EDT)
From: xxx@xxxxx
To: Daniel Saunders <xxxx@qlink.queensu.ca>
Subject: Thesis progress indicator
This seemed like the sort of thing you write about in your how to work Web
log - I've set up a cron job to measure the size of my thesis draft and
post it on my Web comic's front page. I don't know if that'll help me
stay motivated, but I found similar tactics helpful when I was doing
NaNoWriMo. The official announcement for comic readers will go up in
tomorrow's news posting, but the stats are already visible at
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/bonobo-conspiracy/ .
--
Matthew Skala
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/
----
Absolutely Matthew, this sounds like a neat idea. 37 pages,
nice work! Is this just writing things down for a first draft, or are
these pages that you've signed off on?
3 comments:
This is absolutely first-draft material. The Perl script simply extracts the page count from the Postscript output of my make file. Some of the pages included in the count are blank, some of them are full of "Lorem ipsum", and some of them contain material cut'n'pasted from my previous publications, which will have to be rewritten before I can actually use it. The point is really to have a visible indication of progress, not that the numbers are particularly meaningful themselves.
I especially like the automated part of it, which is the novel aspect - if work is going badly it's sometimes hard to get motivated to update the chart showing how work is going badly. Your approach to this draft sounds like the sort of "draft 0" or "rope bridge" idea that has come up a couple of times on here. Just having something of a substantial length, even if chunks of it are gibberish, can be very encouraging. (ha, I had to look up Lorem ipsum but I remember that from my campus newspaper days. Nifty)
Matthew’s idea was certainly wonderful! I think keeping track of how much progress you’ve done can be a thesis help in writing the paper. That way, you can look forward on how your paper is looking after you did some work. Anyway, I do hope a lot of people would see this idea.
Post a Comment