The woes of upgrade writing

I don’t usually have problems writing. I like writing, but working on this upgrade text has been something else. Nothing has seemed to work. Oh, I have written. I’ve produced text, lots of text, but not the kind of text I need. It has been too much, too little, the wrong focus, and something underlying that has disrupted my whole process of writing. 

I have come to a point where I just cannot let it go. I work too much, too late, too long and then I go to bed. I have to sleep after all. I turn off the lights and my brain is still working with the text, and I have to get up again, because I realised something that I had to write down. Just as I don’t have problems writing (normally), I usually don’t have problems sleeping, but now I’ve woken up in the middle of the night dreaming about my data, my analysis, my text and I have to write. If I don’t write I can’t go back to sleep. I need to get that thought into text, but then in the morning I still have to get up the usual time after just a few short hours of sleep.

But today something finally shifted and I realised two things, two problems. One has to do with me, and my approach to writing the analysis, the other has to do with my data as such.

Last night I woke up again, got up and wrote down my whole analysis in one long flow of text. I know what is in the data. By now, I know my data very well. This morning I saw that I could use that text I wrote last night and go back add examples from the data. I have been trying to work from my data and build the text around that and now I reversed the direction, and this worked much better. The other thing I suddenly realised that has eluded me until now is a problem present in my empirical data. Once I identified this I could understand what I have been seeing for a while but not been able to conceptualise clearly until now.  Hopefully, I can now get down to the mechanics of writing and just get the text done. Write, re-write, polish, tie to literature. All those things that you do in academic writing.

It was there all the time, right in front of me!

Writing for Upgrade

I am writing for my upgrade, which in my case is mostly a process of excluding data and content and then restructuring and re-arranging my text. This I have now done again and again over the last few weeks.

‘Only include what is absolutely necessary for the upgrade’ was the advice I was given. My problem is that I have no previous experience in writing for a doctoral upgrade. So, how much is “necessary”? I have now excluded whole data sets, minimized the data descriptions and method, excluded whole sections from, and condensed the literature review, and hopefully I now have enough space left for a decent discussion about analyses, results and my continued research.  It is frustrating, intense and tiring, but also very, very satisfying once the text starts to come together.

I am being reclusive and liking it, which is probably a good thing in the midst of Covid19 social distancing and increasing lock-downs. On Monday I have to be back to more regular work and meetings online, and cannot spend all my time writing. I will miss it!

Image: “Antique Typewriter Keys” from PublicDomainPictures. License CC0 Public Domain

A new page with literature on methodology

As my list of reading and references are getting longer and harder to navigate I have now started a separate page with a list of literature on methodology that I have found useful. This list is a living document and will change with time. It also reflects my research interest in multimodal study, but include references to texts on thematic analysis, and other more general texts on research and theory.