Response to My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Dissertation

Today I read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Dissertation. As one who is currently struggling with completing the writing for her qualifying project I was hoping for some ah ha moment reading this article. In stead I ended feeling "so I'm not the only one." Confirmation that motivation and the research muse is fickle. Early on I sat down and wrote 17 pages concerning background, literature review, and identification of need. I figured that by the time I was done with the research I'd just need to go back and edit, fill in some blanks, and add the results. Oh how silly of me. Looking back at what I wrote several months ago I feel utterly disconnected from it. So now I am back to procrastinating, looking at an ever looming deadline and the hope that inspiration suddenly hits. I used to keep a notepad by the bed, as I would always seem to find solutions to issues of wording, transitions, or methodology at 2 AM. Recently the only thing keeping me awake is the problem, not the solution. The one glimmer of hope I found from Rachel Herrmann's article was the last sentence "And it's much easier to edit a terrible dissertation than it is to edit a nonexistent perfect one." Well I have a pretty terrible draft of a qualifying project, but maybe that's alright. Just write, stop trying to be perfect the first time around. Allow myself to put words down that I know will never make it to the next draft; it's better than just staring at the computer screen hoping for a visit from the research fairy.

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