Writing, writing, writing…

So research has been a slog the last few weeks. Motivation has been low, and my attempts to massage the data I extracted from a set of case studies into something approaching reasonable analysis is only now starting to come together, a week before I go back to see my advisor. (I suppose I should be grateful that it is starting to come together…) It’s taken a number of false starts to actually get text written, including assembling a big database which turns out to be too unwieldy to use and will likely sit on my hard drive, untouched until corrupted by cosmic rays.

The one thing I’ve discovered, though, is that even what seems like “false starts” give you something. Creating the database (and its lovely interface) structured my thoughts about what some of the important ideas are, and spending all of that time working on it means it stays in the forefront of my mind while going through the case study summaries I wrote. And knowing what is – and is not – in this set of case studies helped give me a context for where my analysis of these studies goes into the larger prelim paper.

I will say one thing, though… my previous prelim paper (before I moved away from computational linguistics) was a pain to write, but it was more straightforward. This one is taking a lot of perspective-shifting in my brain, and it’s easy to get down about it. In the end, though, I think it will be worth it. I hope so.

So anyway, I’m writing – and so far, while the content is good, the text is not exactly beautiful.

Thank God no one ever sees my first drafts

But hey, I’m writing, and writing means I’m one or more steps closer to having the thing written.

And hey… it’s snowing. One more reminder that we have truly escaped L.A.